Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: Let’ s talk about both of those processes: [what happens] when you generate the lead – and you described a bit of your lead generation process already – and what the follow-on tracking of this is like. How do you manage to step this through the closing process or sales funnel?

KS: Once we have a lead qualified as a suspect, an opportunity where somebody has filled in a form, we pass those leads to the business development representatives to call the customer and to further qualify their requirements and better understand what other information they might need. Once we have that information, we pass that qualified lead to the channel managers, and those channel managers will again contact the customer, understand who the most appropriate channel partner might be based upon their requirements, and open up a business opportunity inside Salesforce. They create an opportunity, and once an opportunity is created, we have set workflow rules within Salesforce to ensure that there is ongoing repetitive communication with that contact throughout the buying process, which we anticipate being three to nine months long on average. We ensure that a customer is contacted at least every 30 days throughout that buying process, and if communication has not occurred [or] a task has not been filled out inside Salesforce, we trigger a series of reports where the management escalates all the way up to an entire senior leadership team.

SM: But who is expected to communicate with the customer during that process? Is it your telephone business development reps?

KS: Our channel managers, our field sales managers, and our partners. Whoever owns the account at that particular time in the sales process. Initially it is a channel manager; when it passes over to our field sales team, the fields sales manager is responsible for keeping the record up to date. They record if they engage the channel partner, and when they do their regular weekly call with the channel partner, they update the contact record appropriately to ensure that we understand exactly what is happening. If we require a proof of concept so that we may put equipment on premise, or if we are doing an on-premise trial, then our support engineers and system engineers will also update the customer record. At any given moment we could have business development representatives, channel managers, field sales managers, and system engineers from Exinda updating our Salesforce record, and we would have input from our channel partner, which would be entered into the sales record by one of those four people.

SM: There are a couple of questions that come to mind from that description. Do have a field sales organization as well on top of the channel?

KS: Yes.

SM: You are not handing off the leads to the channel; your field sales organization is actually selling?

KS: It is a high-cost model, yes! We ensure because of the value of the [deal]. This is not a thousand-dollar software package, so we have a high-touch deal organization that also approaches the customer in consent with our partner.

SM: Wow! That is a very expensive channel.

KS: It is a very expensive channel.

SM: That is a very, very expensive channel, I would say too expensive.

KS: Well, it depends on the profit margin that is offered by your product.

SM: Well, I don’t buy that. But let’s continue. I think, based on what I see in the industry, this has become an industry norm at the deal size level you are selling at. People are actually trying to close deals on the phone, or the channel is closing the deals. It sounds as though you have a field sales organization and a channel, and that, I think, is not profitable.

KS: Well, I think you would find that most organizations and industries are not the same model. This is a model that Cisco uses for networking products.

SM: For a much larger average deal size, right?

KS: I am not sure that Cisco’s average deal size is much larger.

SM: If the average deal size is larger, they use field sales, and if the average deal size is not large, they don’t use field sales, they hand it over to their voice system integrators. So, I guess what confuses me is that you use a voice channel, which makes ample sense to me, but you are now saying that you also use a field sales organization of your own, and that just doesn’t make sense to me. Anyway, the other question I had was, Do your channel partners touch your CRM system?

KS: No, today our channel partners do not directly touch our CRM system. We are in the midst of implementing a new partner portal as part of our 2011 initiative that will allow them, through the partner portal, to enter updated information on registered deals and on open business opportunities and to drive e-mail campaigns directly through the partner portal. That is a 2011 initiative that we feel we will continue to increase the velocity of our partner opportunity generation.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda
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