Mastering mid-market in the channel

Founded over 15 years ago by a team who had been instrumental in building the early internet market; Cavell delivers unrivalled, in-depth analysis of the cloud communications market. We caught up with Cavell’s well-respected analyst Matthew Townend, who focuses on cloud communications and whose career has always centred around new markets, to discuss the challenges of tackling mid-market in the digital transformation era.

With the advent of UCaaS opening up new opportunities for channel partners, Gamma wanted to examine the ways in which our partners can broaden their horizons with new markets and verticals. Speaking with Cavell’s Director of Research and Consulting, Matt Townend, we discovered some of the key tips for recognising opportunity and identifying key differentiators in driving mid-market sales.

When looking to move up market, one of the biggest challenges is really understanding the customer requirements, which by the very nature of larger businesses may become more complicated. They may work in a specific sector that has its own business challenges and dynamics. The other large challenge is how to stand out in a crowded market and build credibility.

With respect to SME companies, the mid-market generally tends to have a better understanding of the technologies and as such are more educated buyers. They perhaps are less likely to buy on price alone, and therefore service and tailoring of your solution to their needs become important. It is clear from our enterprise research that they are more likely to have more requirement for services such as collaboration or remote working and will be considering issues such as automation and customer interaction. Interest is around the value unified communications can add to today’s business landscape and how it can improve the way people communicate both internally but also externally to partners and customers.

The people who I have seen become successful have brought some element of focus to their strategy, rather than just a blind move into the mid-market. So maybe that is by being experts in a certain vertical or by building expertise in a particularly relevant adjacent technology area. Within this approach you can focus less on features and more on the benefits the products bring to the end customer. I also feel partners should make some tangible differences to the way they service customers and build relevant case studies and use cases that demonstrate the benefits in order to drive business forward.

The size of a business does not necessarily impact on the complexity of its telecoms. There are some very sophisticated SMEs and some larger companies that still want little more than dial tone and voicemail. Often there can be greater variation between industry than business size. However, in general terms – larger businesses are probably more likely to be looking at collaboration, remote working along with more complex integration – with applications such CRM solutions, call centre functionality and reporting.

Certainly, they are more open to new technologies. But that brings challenges as they can expect services to work simply like the applications they use in the consumer world, they are also more likely to use their own applications in the business world. Also because they may flit between different providers in using different apps I think they can be less tolerant and more impatient in waiting for new features and consequently be more willing to swap suppliers more regularly.

My main piece of advice would be to make sure you understand what the issues are in driving buyer decisions in each vertical and be able to articulate how your proposition solves those pain points. Don’t assume one solution proposition is going to suit all customers. When partners lose a deal, they should be sure to find out why – the old adage that a salesman will always say they lost the deal because you were too expensive is not always the case. When you have had success make sure you build credibility through cases studies, whitepapers and demonstrate knowledge and credibility.