10 Things to Consider BEFORE Talking to Tech Salespeople

Occasionally we get asked questions along the lines of, “Why would we work with you and work with a broker versus working directly with the inside salesperson from this company?” And, “Won’t we get better support from that inside salesperson, ’cause they have more control, more leverage over their pricing and they can give us better support?”

While on the surface it sounds intuitive and it does make sense… it’s absolutely incorrect.

Here’s a few things to think about:

1. The average tenure from a salesperson at a telecommunications company is about two years. So if you’re interacting with somebody, just look at their LinkedIn profile: how long have they been in their current role? And you can get a pretty good gauge of how long they’re going to be in that role afterwards.
2. Incentivization: direct sales forces have quotas. That salesperson has to hit their quota: It’s important for both their ongoing employment as well as their salary comp, whether or not they’re getting bonuses or not, all come down to this magic number that’s assigned to them with their quota. 
3. Almost all these companies completely detach from you as a customer once the sale is done. You sign the contract, at that point you transition into an account management person and you transition into a project management person, and the salesperson is gone. So they can promise ANYTHING they want to up to the point of you signing the contract. At that point they’ve hit their number, the sale counts as their quota!
4. This, again, depends on whether or not that company is on signature or an installation. A lot of these companies count salespeople on signature- not any actual installation of the actual service! So they can promise anything they want to you, because all they need to do is get you to sign that contract. Everything else they don’t care about at that point going forward.
5. All of these things become misaligned with your interest as a customer with the service. Now, good salespeople of course want to maintain that relationship and they want you to be a customer for life, but understand the incentivization and how they’re actually compensated and what the longevity of these people actually are. 
6. Let’s circle back to quota for a second: as a broker, we have ZERO QUOTA! We have no quota. We have zero quota with any of our hundreds of providers that we interact with our customers. So I have no incentivization, and my team has no incentivization to actually go out and try to push deals through that don’t make sense for our customers because it makes absolutely no difference to us. It makes no difference to us if you use vendor A, vendor B, vendor C, because we get paid the same from all of them.
7. We are not required to sell a certain amount of money with vendor A, vendor B vendor C in order to continue selling their services or maintain employment. 
8. In a lot of cases, what we’re doing for our customers and what we actually approach it with, is something little different: we have insider information, we have insider pricing, we know what the actual underlying cost is, we know what services actually have to be, we don’t have to hit a certain number in order to maintain our comp or quota or give us a bonus or any of these things along those lines, and so we become aligned with our customers’ interests. 
9. We’re aligned with your interests on these cycles. Why? Because if we do a good job for you, you’ll use us again, and you’ll tell your friends. So our incentivization becomes really basic: our incentivization is to do the best job possible for our customers so that way our customers grow with us, and our customers refer us to their friends. This is how we grow. 
10. In those cases, do we care if there’s an extra 3 first percent, four percent 10% on a deal that’s being executed? Of course we don’t care. We want the best pricing possible so if we know that we can squeeze down a service to whatever number it actually is –in the case of UCaaS, if we know we can take a vendor from $25 a month per seat to $10 a month per seat, we’re not going to play this game with you and say “We’re going to give you a smoking deal at $20 a seat.” No, we’re going to go back to that provider and we’re going to and say we know you can do this deal for $10. Give us the paperwork for $10, let’s get this deal done.” It’s a completely different environment.

So if you’re in the process of looking for technology for your company, give us a call at ITBroker.com, we will explain to you the differences of what it’s like using a broker, how we help you find the right tech for your business, how we leverage our insider knowledge and pricing to get you the best deal and how we help you save money and grow your business.