Clowns dress up for a living. They make people laugh, entertain children’s birthday parties, but after they’ve removed their makeup and taken off their costume they know what they do for a living. A musician knows what they do for a living.
But what exactly do MSP’s and Managed IT services companies do for a living? What do the exact people who might read this blog do for a living every day?
As most small mid sized businesses go, you strive to constantly change what you’re doing in an effort to make these big permanent changes based on our view of what the market needs.
Does the market need a better horse? Or are they better off with an automobile? Henry Ford didn’t rely on his customers to tell him what they needed. I know what you’re thinking, back then things were different, and you’re right.
If you had an efficient factory you could afford to pay people more, and build things more efficiently. You could easily produce huge changes, which caused highways to be built across the United States and the world, increased wages, get people to where they’re going faster, and create huge industries with manufacturing. But we’re running out of cheaper machines, and we’re reaching the limit of how cheap labor can be.
Then it was TV: If you spend enough money, if you spend enough time, you could win. You could buy your way into a successful business, and there are many many business today that still thrive in that environment. I know! We have a better mouse trap! Push! Push it all onto the world! If I find enough people and I find enough money i’ll sell enough. But this requires you to act like the king, telling people what to do next; Mass marketing requires average ideas because you’re selling to the mass.
At Yeastar we believe this is a time of leadership, a key time of change in the environment of selling IT and communication solutions to customers. The way our Partners make change and become successful is not by using resources of money or power, but by leading and being resourceful with the vendors they pick for their solutions.
Dealers of telecommunications can’t continue to all keep repeating the same patterns. The days of the Nortel reseller are long, long gone. The ideas of the customers that we collectively used to serve need to be brought back to today’s reality.
Creating and spreading the idea of the value of a new phone system that’s actually low cost, AND reliable, has a lot behind it. After All, you can change a piece of code, the code then operates differently after it’s altered; and there is a distinguishable moment in time when the code was changed that makes it behave differently after the change.
The S-Series Phone systems are here living in that moment. We’ve created a product that we believe hit’s every single painpoint that we’ve uncovered in our 10 years of manufacturing, and our decades of experience in telecommunications. Our mission is to lead IT providers. Not by using a lot of money, or power, but by sharing our solutions with sellers of hosted and premise based phone systems, giving the industry’s largest margins, manufacturing reliable communications equipment, and offering the latest in software ingenuity to truly enable our partners to grow and evangelize a new and better alternative to their customers’ existing communications technology.
You don’t need to spellbind everyone … it doesn’t work anymore.
The Yeastar S-Series phone system provides a fresh opportunity for telecommunications dealers to connect people with these new ideas. Many of whom are familiar with expensive hosted phone systems, or analog pbx’s, but now thanks to the internet, thanks to lower costs, and thanks to a reliable offering, you can target these customers, but you need to be clear in your marketing of them.
It turns out these folks, new targeted customers, or perhaps existing customers who haven’t been approached in months, or even years, are looking to you to help them identify and connect with these new technologies. It doesn’t have to be about money, or factories, you’re offering a straight-forward solution that will improve their communications and helps them continue to grow their business through better tools.
What our partners do for a living is to find something worth changing in their customer’s businesses, and then aligning it with a solution they believe has value. We then help them assemble as many of those types of people as possible through evangelizing our partners, and our products. The most common trait our most successful partners all share is that they won’t abide the status quote; they want things to move forward, instead of following the rules and offering the same solutions as everyone else they take their eye off following the bounding dot, blindly along.
They also recognize that they cannot convert everyone by brute force, but by in the creativity of the solutions that they provide. This can happen in many different ways; especially in technology: Linus of Linux and Bill of Microsoft both found different ways to get people to navigate their technology. Smuckers didn’t invent toast and jam, they merely decided that they offered the best jam and found people that agree. Tom’s shoes, they didn’t invent shoes, they just found a compelling way for people who are looking for shoes to engage with their product (buy 1 pair of shoes, get an exact pair donated for free to someone with no shoes).
In conclusion – don’t go quietly about what you’re doing, tell a story, you connect the customer, you lead them to your solutions, and you make the change. You can do this by challenging yourself with these questions:
- What solution or product are you losing to that, you’re looking to upset? If you’re not upsetting anyone you’re not changing the status quo.
- How are you going to connect to them / what is your common story?
- Who is your audience? Don’t focus on the mechanics of what you’re building, but the solution that you’re providing.
Discover the curiosity in your community of customers, and share that with new potential targets. You don’t need permission from customers to give them a beneficial solution, and in case you do … we’re waiting for you to show us where to go next.
All you need to do is start.
