If you’ve bought into the idea that pure play transactional sales models are not the future, you might be wondering what a nontransactional business model looks like. To help illustrate the point, Channel Partners has invited several channel partners — agents, VARs and dealers — to share their transformation stories. In this issue, you will meet them and find out how and why they transformed their businesses. Then over the next four months, Channel Partners will cover more of their experiences, including:
- How they made the change (e.g., hiring, acquiring, developing capabilities, partnering, etc.)
- How they benefitted from transformation
- How they have been challenged by transformation
- Next step(s) in transforming away from transactional sales
We thank these companies for allowing us to share their insight and hard knocks with you. We hope that you will follow this series to its conclusion in December’s issue, which will be devoted entirely to transformation. You also can follow their stories online at www.channelpartnersonline.com/blogs/transformation.
Transformation leader: Greg Praske, CEO
Number of employees: 46
Year established: 1991
Original transactional business model: Telecom agent/subagent/master agent
Post-transformation business model: Voice and data network services consulting firm
How has your company moved beyond transactional sales models?
Over the years, we have consistently reinvested our profits to expand our value proposition. Our first step, in the mid-‘90s, was to add an account management team whose focus was to get out and visit with our clients on a regular basis. That team would perform first bill reviews to validate our clients were indeed getting what we proposed. They would check in to see if there were any changes in our clients’ businesses and explore any ways that we could assist with the management of their services.
The next step occurred in the CLEC days at the end of the ‘90s. At that point, we added an Implementation Engineering team that performed site surveys, assisted with cutovers and physically verified all services. We wanted to provide our clients the confidence and insurance to take advantage of the new local services that were now available to them.
