Selling connectivity must shift from a conversation around speeds and fees to a discussion on the customer experience. This will allow resellers to have far more interesting conversations surrounding upsells and add-ons, according to Neil Wilson, Product Strategy Director at Virtual1.
Speaking at his company’s Future Connect event staged at The Brewery in London, Wilson said: “Connectivity will be a relatively low spend going forward for customers, who will be spending big on a raft of applications and data. However, good connectivity is foundational to this; if companies are underspending on connectivity, then they are compromising return on investment for everything else they are spending money on as an organisation.”
Wilson believes resellers must now ask organisations how they operate, where their critical systems and data are held and how they communicate with their customers. Understanding the organisation’s operations and gauging how much bandwidth is needed is key to then using the building blocks of public connectivity, fibre and globalised software such as SD-WAN to put a solution together that ticks all of their boxes.
Once the broadband is in place, the value in the service layer will grow significantly, added Clayton Nash, Strategy Director at CityFibre, who underlined why full fibre is so important to helping the UK thrive as a service-based economy.
“The UK is the number one investment destination in Europe, with $37bn venture capital investment since 2015,” he said.
“This digital revolution is currently being run on a network that is 170 years old. It is time to replace the UK’s first network with its second. Boosted broadband will bring a slew of currently non-existent applications that our customers will want to access. Discuss the value adds and you’ll have far more valuable conversations with your customers.”
Future Connect also featured Applied Futurist Tom Cheesewright, who discussed the importance of creating athletic organisations, and Graeme Hackland, CIO, Williams F1 team, who illuminated the key competitive advantage of data protection and availability.
“Companies should strive to be networks, not monoliths,” said Cheesewright. “The focus has been on become a lean organisation, but as we have entered a period of high frequency change, the next 100 years will require businesses to be more agile.”
“My tip is to improve data flow and redistribute power. This makes it easier for information to get the heart of the business and sends out power to where the information matters most.”
Pictured l-r: John Walters, Network Security and SD-WAN Sales Specialist, Virtual1: Jude Mott, Product Manager, Cloud, Virutal1: Kevin Blyth, Product Manager, Access, Virtual1: Nash: Jason King, CSO, Virtual1: Simon Durrant, Business Development Director, Virtual1: Wilson: Patrick Grillo, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Fortinet.