Why Selling to the Service Provider is So Unique vs the Enterprise

By Andy Miller and Dino Di Palma, Managing Partners at True North Advisory

In our previous blogs, we covered topics that concerned Enterprise channels and verticals such as Federal, and how early stage companies need to choose and prioritize their entry points based upon solution, use case, time to market and resource requirements.

At True North, because of our strong heritage with our Managing Partner’s experience with both Service Provider and Enterprise, we have been providing advisory work to our early stage companies around the topic of when and how to enter the Enterprise and Service Provider market. Many early stage companies have designed solutions specific to the Enterprise or Service Provider, but are naive as it relates to understanding the vast differences in go to market (GTM) motions that they require.

Our focus is to create a GTM framework for both Service Provider (SP) and Enterprise, that lay out the differences around the GTM motion, to allow the client to prioritize the correct vertical, channel, and use case as a focus area. There are several clear differences in selling to the Service Provider. Our focus is to lay out those differences so that the client can achieve the highest degree of success.

Clearly the ability for the solution vendor to understand the trends and points of a SP is key. Here are a sample of trends outlined below:

• B2B is clearly a growth market for the SP’s, and selling into Large Enterprise represents a TAM to exceed 237B by 2025, so the market for the SP’s to sell into Enterprise is very relevant.
• SP’s are partnering with key vendors to deliver Enterprise, IOT specific ( MVNO’s) and digital upstarts as key focus areas
• SP’s are expanding verticals and bundling offerings to provide a end to end solution
• SP’s are very focused on enforcing digital trust and data protection/security

Understanding the SP trends will then lead to understanding the key differences and attributes of selling to the Service Provider. Right now, everything related to the Service Provider is about Digital Transformation. In fact, 86% of telecom operators are engaged in digital transformation projects. The feedback from these operators in terms of what they are looking for in the GTM process is:

• Positive reputation in the SP and Client community
• Understanding of SP and Client Challenges
• Differentiation in terms of solution use case, ROI and TCO
• Ability to tailor messages appropriately

The client needs to have a strategy that clearly defines the sales motion. Are you selling to or selling through the SP, or is your strategy to do both? How you build your go to market teams require you to clearly define these sales approaches. Selling though requires, for example, a team that can provide strong sales enablement to the SPs go to market team.

Selling to, requires a strong technical team to complete the integration and testing. Regardless of your approach this is a 12–18 month complex journey where you need to influence a diversity of decision makers. In fact recent statistics show that purchasing decisions involve on an average up to 38 people and take an average of 45 weeks, so it is a long process from initial discussions.

The SP channel is distinctive from the Enterprise channel. The SP channels include the large infrastructure players such as Nokia & Ericsson as well as the regional players with local expertise. The strategic SIs can also be good channels for both the Enterprise and SPs. As an overall strategy you should look at evaluating and selecting the best distribution partners and eco -system tech partners that elevate your offering. This needs to include niche local players as well as channels with global reach.

When selling to SPs your teams require a strong balance of both technical and sales expertise. Successful vendors must evolve their sales and marketing strategies to capitalize on the opportunity presented by telco digital transformation. This will enable you to tailor your message to the different decision makers.

SPs offer a range of offerings to the micro, SMB, Mid Market and Large Enterprise. The vendor’s solution must fit specific markets, and be developed with simplicity, repeatability, ease of deployment and serviceability. The aspect of product management as it relates to packaging, bundling, pricing, deployment tools is vastly different than that of Enterprise.

Large SP’s such as BT, ATT, Verizon, Vodafone to name a few operate both in country, in continent and cross continent, creating both tremendous selling and POC time but also with the benefit of a global sales force is the vendor solution is selected and embraced by the end user customers.

The team at True North’s vast experience coming from a heritage of Broadsoft and Acme Packet has over 25 years of experience in the sell through and sell to aspects of the Service Provider, beginning with software and evolving to the Cloud.

“There is no better set of experiences than that of the True North team, both from the CEO, CFO, CTO and CRO perspectives that can advise and mentor early stage companies that are pondering the challenges of the Service Provider market”, says Andy Miller, Managing Partner at True North.

“The experience that we have from companies that have pioneered and excelled in creating best in class Service Provider sales teams such as Cisco, Acme Packet and Broadsoft are truly is second to none, and if executed with speed and precision, the results are material and game changing”, says Dino Di Palma, Managing Partner at True North.

If you are looking to either enter or improve your positioning into the Service Provider market, we look forward to engaging with you on the timely topics as the carriers focus on the key strategy of Digital Transformation.