technologyreseller.co.uk 47 Q&A that we end up with the right outcome for both parties in the most seamless manner? TR: What are your priorities for the next 12 months? GJ: For us, it’s all about PSTN shutdown and all-IP. A lot of the work that we’ve been doing for the last 18 months is brought into focus by that. The fact that you’ve got to move to cloud voice, the fact that the connection is going to be IP-orientated is super-important for us, alongside services like Teams and everything that you put on top of that. That really is our number one focus. As a business, probably 65% to 70% of what I do is around data or IP. There’s very little that’s outside of that. The next big chunk is probably voice services, and I include traditional voice which could interconnect with cloud voice. We see voice as one of the greatest growth areas in the market. TR: It’s a big growth area for new entrants and IT resellers looking at this area, but that must be a risk for you and your more traditional resellers. GJ: If you go back 10 years, there were a lot of people selling copper-based voice around local, national and mobile rates. Now it’s about what hosting or cloud platform you take: how does that work? how do you collaborate with that? how does that plug into a call centre if you need it to? There are large global operators here in our market and there are small UK operators, so I think you’re right to say it’s a growth area for many people. But the good news is it’s a massive growth area for everyone in the market. TR: Are you optimistic about the future? There are all sorts of headwinds at the moment. GJ: We’re really optimistic about the future. We’ve got a clear strategy; we’re developing some really exciting products and services; and we know that there’s a seminal point happening in terms of the move from copper to fibre. When you put all that together, the future looks really exciting. The really pleasing feedback we get is that people have seen a change in BT Wholesale. They see a much more externally focused business, a business that is genuinely getting a higher profile and that has a clear strategy. I know lots of companies use the phrase ‘reinventing ourselves’, but from our perspective, having really doubled down on the channel, having a clear focus and a clear strategy is really exciting for us in terms of the opportunity we see and the timing. customers in the optimal manner, in terms of getting the best for them and enabling them to compete. I don’t think there’s any doubt that recruitment is tough at the moment. A challenge for all of us in the IT industry is how to find people that have the capabilities to take our customers on that digital transformation journey that we know is upon us. TR: Presumably an organisation of your size is able to train people up quite well. Do you have initiatives for that? GJ: We have lots of training for salespeople, technical people and commercial people, and we use a specific sales methodology that we take the account teams through that’s really around how to identify, articulate and share value with customers in a compelling way. We have training that helps people manage large accounts. If you’re facing into the equivalent of BT, which could be Verizon or ATT, you’re in a very federated environment so we have training that helps people build networks, plans, contact points and understand their position. We do loads and loads of solution and product training. We have formal training that people go through, and we also have quite a lot of lunch and learn-type conversations. Every Friday someone will talk through a specific solution or a specific service. It’s very interactive and very much about people asking questions: how do you do this? how do you do that? how did you approach this? The best feedback we get from those interactive Friday sessions is when someone, not necessarily the trainer, but someone who’s sold it, been there, done it and seen it from the commercial side gets to share the benefits of their experience. Then, as you would expect, we have lots of corporate training around network security, around our commitments, around operating with integrity, but that externalfacing stuff is really important. We also encourage everyone to have personal development plans and to keep their PDPs up to date. And we encourage them to look at different sources of learning, be it learning from a colleague, taking LinkedIn learning or internal BT learning. What can you do? What skills do you need to seek out? The latest one I’m looking at is negotiation training. One of the things about negotiation is people think because they do a lot of it they must be good at it, but it could be that because they do a lot of it they have become slightly lazy. How do we get people to do negotiation training so got an element of configuration, you’ve got an element of liaison with a customer and then you’ve got things like number porting that you have to pre-plan, that you have to arrange, that has to happen on the right day. There’s an element of coordination to telco that can be new to people who operate in other environments. TR: Presumably these new partners would also benefit from the professional services that you offer. GJ: Our professional services can do many things. They’re designed for people that either don’t have the capability, don’t have the resource or are constrained at certain points in time. You might have a customer that wins two or three big contracts but doesn’t have the resource in place to do all of them at the same time. Instead of having to hire extra resource or find people to upskill, we offer a range of services that fit around the products we sell. It could be audit, it could be doing investigation beforehand, it could even be placing orders for them and actually managing that process. It could be delivery of those orders. It could be taking equipment out or configuring equipment. We’ve shut down buildings for people where we’ve audited, taken the equipment out, decommissioned it. We’ve managed really large retail project delivery from cradle to grave. And we’ve helped companies that might have a bow wave of work but not want to recruit to get through that. Our services allow people to punch above their weight and take on projects and not worry about having to hire 20 or 30 extra people. TR: As you say, you’ve got this broad business, with multiple routes to market. What challenges do you face in supporting all these different types of channel partner? GJ: We are organised with a mixture of high value and high volume. One of the things that I keep asking myself is ‘are we trying to sell too much?’, ‘are we doing what we need to do to the best of our ability?’. I think the challenges we face are making sure that my team is trained, that they understand the product, they understand the service and that they’re able to articulate that to a customer. I think the second point is how do we create the knowledge and selfsufficiency in our customers to allow them to be effective and to add value to their businesses? Like everyone, we are permanently trying to upskill the capability of our salespeople to be effective but also to be knowledgeable and to manage their
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