ChannelVision Magazine

virtual reality That’s doesn’t seem to be the case, how- ever, at least not as of the fourth quarter of last year. At the Tech+Connect conference put on by Alliance Partners in San Antonio, Texas, last November, in a room full of top-selling agents – all personally invited by leading master agents – only a small handful of these heavy hitters re- mained standing when asked who had received commissions on an SD-WAN sale. “This is the reality of where we are,” said Eric Knight, CEO of SimpleWAN, while on stage at Alliance Partners’ Tech+Connect event. Perhaps it’s not surprising. It can take time for transformational technologies to convert the masses. Just ask the agents that built IP telephony businesses. Years after VoIP hit its “peak of in- flated expectations,” there are still large chunks of companies to convert. And much like the early days of VoIP, the work is just beginning for the feet on the street selling SD-WAN, with plenty still to be figured out in terms of pitches and positioning. Fortunately for those agents and brokers that lived through the IP telephony transition, selling trans- formational technology is nothing, and the early positioning of SD-WAN shares some similarities to what agents saw when swiveling to VoIP. By Martin Vilaboy F or as long as we’ve been hearing the buzz about software defined wide area networking, one would think agents are cashing checks on SD-WAN deals. Street-view sales strategies for the software-defined transformation 30 Channel Vision | March - April, 2018