Like so many things today, immediate capital purchases are declining in favour of monthly paid goods and services. Whether it's your home, your gas bill, your new car or your telephony solution, consumers and businesses are moving inexorably towards a credit-turnover model, writes Clive Jefferys, Managing Director of telco recruiter, JMA Network.
For most dealers the days of selling tin and getting a lump-sum pay out from a leasing company have become a thing of the past.
We may dress it all up as 'making our clients sticky' or 'building forward revenues' but the plain fact is that to stay competitive, nearly everything has to be quoted as an ongoing monthly charge.
This has put plenty of strain on dealer cashflow in recent times and now it seems that the rise of hosted telephony will complete this income flow transformation.
The even bigger issue is what this means for the sales people we all rely upon.
Good capital sales people are motivated by four figure commission cheques, but where are they going to come from in future? It's all very well selling a five year contract, but if sales commission becomes £100 per month instead of £2,000 next month, is this truly motivating?
While many argue that this is an opportunity to build a long term revenue/commission stream, most people instinctively mistrust long-term employer promises.
Rightly so, given the way that sales pay schemes tend to adjust, usually downwards, retrospectively, year on year!
Another factor is how deeply technical the telecoms sale has become.
Compared to selling calls, lines and PBX, the complexities of VoIP, SIP, cloud etc take years to grasp. Add in several years of recession and you can start to see why telecoms has failed to attract the next wave of sales recruits it needs to keep moving forward.
What's the solution to this looming Sales Skills Gap? We all need to start training salespeople again, growing them within the business to create loyalty and expertise. Key to this is paying them better, to protect them from temptation elsewhere.