Playbook Volume 10 - ChannelVision Magazine

wants to maintain total control over the servers. In fact, if you look at the growth of the data center space during the last three years, colocation is still a growth business. Where do you think all that cloud resides? Inside a data center in a colocation space. Are partners asking what business- es use the ever-increasing internet bandwidth for? Salesforce, Office365, Hootsuite, Dropbox, Slack and so many more applications are common place and consumed daily. There are also a number of industry-specific soft- ware programs that businesses rely on. Where does that software sit? If you know what software a busi- ness relies on, you will know more about the traffic on their WAN, as well as the bandwidth utilization. Most folks make a guess at how much bandwidth they need. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell the business owner that with these four apps running along with UCaaS, the 20 employees will need 10MB x 10MB? Also, when you start getting into the software the business uses, you will be able to identify upgrade oppor- tunities. Maybe they are using ACT! on a server in the back room. Maybe they are still on their own Microsoft Ex- change. Perhaps they don’t even need those servers anymore because most software resides elsewhere. The more information you have, the better your recommendations can be. As Chuck Piazza of Momentum Telecom stated in his sales presenta- tion at the MicroCorp event, asking better questions and having questions that others do not ask are what sets one apart as the trusted advisor. Your main job is to identify opportu- nities. Sure you are there to quote out an internet pipe, but if you ask enough questions you can “land and expand.” At the core, partners are there to help businesses leverage technology to their advantage. Or as Hugh Macleod of Gapingvoid puts it, “Business is the art of getting people to where they need to be faster than they would get there without you.” o Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consult- ing agency. He is also author of five books and available to speak at your events. Software Budget Breakdown for 2019 (1-99 Employees) Operating systems 15% Security 12% Productivity 11% Back-up/DR 10% Industry-specific apps 9% Virtualization 9% Business support apps 7% Email servers 6% IT management 4% Database management 4% Communications 3% Developer tools 1% Other/Don’t know 8% Source: Spiceworks 25 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK