Avant CCaaS, Cybersecurity Teams Target New Buyer Personas in 2023
Stephen Semmelroth said partners will evolve in cybersecurity to sell to more stakeholders than the CIO.
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How will Avant’s cybersecurity supplier portfolio evolve from last year?
Stephen Semmelroth, senior director of security at Avant, said his team’s overarching goal is to expand into “different buyer personas.” That’s because in 2022, the company targeted cybersecurity providers whose solutions met the needs of the buyers agents were used to selling to. As a result, Avant was giving advisors solutions to position to, on average, the chief information officer at an enterprise or midmarket company.
“What are the solutions that are inside the domain and purview of that chief information officer? Enterprise or corporate-focused security methods, where we don’t have to go train a trusted advisor and a whole new buyer persona? Where are they comfortable now? How can we build a desire to continue to grow and expand a professional practice that a trusted advisor has without pushing them too much or too far?” he posed.
But 2023, he said, will position partners to sell to other people, including but not limited to the chief information security officer.
The Cyber Defense Matrix (pictured above) created by Sounil Yu, plays a key role in Avant and its advisors’ customer engagements.
Partners use the three-dimensional framework to identify and show where a particular solution or policy fits within a customer’s security gaps. For example, managed extended detection and response (EDR) will fit in a different area than that of SASE, and potentially complement one another.
“We can very quickly look and see what a coverage at a client looks like,” he said.
At the time of the interview, Semmelroth said he had used the matrix on five calls that week. And advisors are adopting it in their sales practices.
“We have trusted advisors that are going on marketing campaigns using this and our engineers combined, who are already trained to execute this with a client,” Semmelroth said. “Because trusted advisors see the value of not just the portfolio and the enablement in the training, but the process itself and the way to visually see how a service can either consolidate different products or can move the needle.”
Channel Futures asked about the experiences Avant’s cybersecurity vendors are reporting from their engagements in the agent channel. For some of these suppliers, signing with Avant represented their first true foray into the technology advisor community.
Semmelroth said he sees an inflection point occurring between years two and three of partnering with the TSD.
For vendors on the earlier side of that, Semmelroth said vendors tend to increase their investments in the second quarter of their relationship.
“That’s where they really understand the model. They know it in their head, but now they understand it in their heart. Those are two different things,” he said.
Semmelroth said vendor partners reach an inflection point approximately two-and-a-half years into the partnership.
“And that’s where we start to hear the chief financial officers at the vendors say things like, ‘I see a path to being 100% indirect channel,'” he said.
He added that he hears positive feedback from vendors who previously didn’t know the channel existed.
“If they’re not going to make the big bet, they say that it’s key to their success, and it’s the elastic portion of their growth that’s making their investors happy,” he said.
Brent Wilford, Avant’s senior director of CX and unified communications, said market research is pointing to customer demand for self-service options.
That pain point worsened greatly during the shelter-in-place era, when the American public was calling into support lines en masse and putting up with extremely long wait times.
“It’s incumbent on businesses of all shapes, sizes and verticals, to listen to the customers and, as best they can with the investments that they have available to them, provide the best self-service options so I don’t have to wait on hold for 45 minutes to check a package or reschedule an appointment or request a prescription,” he said.
Wilford said work remains in educating the market about the purpose of AI, which enables self-services. On one hand, customers’ early experiences with chatbots may have soured them. Others may view AI-driven self-service as replacements for human agents.
But Wilford said advisors can show how how AI has matured, and that it can help slow agent churn, rather than replace workers.
“We can marry that technology together to not only accomplish what customers are telling us they want, but also to avoid the shortfall of qualified customer service agents that are there to do very mundane things. Human beings want challenges. We want to help people accomplish goals. Agents really want to work on more complex, more empathetic-type questions. Agents don’t want to sit there and just do really simple password resets all day,” Wilford said.
Wilford said many customers need to take inventory of what sort of tasks their agents are handling. How many of those calls serve to schedule appointments or reset passwords?
“There is a need to educate customers that it is mature, that it is reliable, and that it can solve this problem that you might be ignoring,” he said.
For some people dialing a contact center, first-call resolution matters more than self-service.
The former means that an agent will tend to take care of their customers’ problem without transferring them to multiple people.
Wilford pointed to a grill company whose agent walked him through how to set up his new machine on a Sunday morning. Wilford initially contacted the company through chat, and the agent answered him, asking if he could call him and send him a setup video.
Wilford said the businesses that provide first-call resolution to their consumers will differentiate themselves. His omnichannel experience with the grill company won him over as a customer.
“It solved my problems in 15 minutes on a Sunday morning, and they got a year’s worth of free advertising to 1,000 people that I talked to because I use them as an excellent example of customer service,” Wilford said.
Embracing AI and self-service falls into a larger trend for advisors and their business customers; recognizing the growing presence and demands of the younger generation.
“They’re going to be the workforce, and they’re going to be the consumer base very shortly. Our [Gen X and baby boomer] purchasing power will drop as we migrate out of the workforce and as we migrate into retirement. We’re just less and less part of the economy,” said Wilford
And that digitally native generation won’t accept hourlong wait times on the phone without any option of self-service, Wilford said.
Wilford said he has yet to see a deal where a Gen Z’er directly purchased a CCaaS solution.
“The buyers are traditionally more Gen X like myself, maybe the top end of the millennials. But actually I still talk to baby boomers and other Gen X’ers for the most part. The problem is that generally the process of evaluating a contact center transition from on-prem to cloud starts in IT, even though it has very little to do with the day-to-day actions of a contact center,” he said.
However, Wilford said Gen Z is playing a role in these customer engagements. Often the needle moves in a deal when IT starts talking to its contact center managers about their needs. The latter tend to contain younger people, Wilford said. Even if Gen Z and millennials are not the actual people buying the technology, they represent more and more of the people using it.
“That is where I use their stories and their voice to help move that project forward,” he said. “Because this stuff is expensive. You’re talking $30, $40, $50, maybe $100 a month depending on the size of the organization and what they want to deploy. And that’s a big pill to swallow for a CFO who doesn’t understand the complications that we’re dealing with down here.”
Moreover, the purchasers themselves are gradually getting younger. Partners would do well to understand that this next generation represents the buyer of the foreseeable future.
“If you want to sell to people who think of voice 17th on the list and all you offer is an 800 number or maybe an email, you’re going to have a hard time gathering a customer base of younger people that really focus on personalized attention, self-service and empathetic agents who can help me when I need it,” Wilford said.
Channel Futures has predicted that more technology advisors will adopt professional services into their portfolio, particularly to save customers money on UCaaS deployment or earn vendor incentives.
However, Wilford said he doesn’t see a particularly large trend of advisors expanding in that way, whether in CCaaS or UCaaS. He said that for legacy Mitel and Avaya VARs pivoting their customers into the cloud, pro services make a lot of sense.
But as for agents? He’s not so sure. He said those who didn’t view those services as a core competency before probably won’t want to make that investment.
“I really don’t see a wholesale or growing trend of trusted advisors with no experience in pro services wanting to take that on,” he said. “They’re generally hunters. They go find deals. They help people with evaluations, and they move on. Their mindset generally isn’t going to shift to, ‘Now I want to be your tier one and your implementation person.’ For the incremental revenue that you’ll gain, there’s a lot of education experience that you’re going to need to be good at that.
Wilford expressed doubt over UCaaS providers’ appetite for training and certifying those types of partners.
“I think they want to be very strategic with who they bring into that fold. Because the implementation and the service that you get from the outset really set the stage for whether you’re happy or not,” he said.
Channel Futures has predicted that more technology advisors will adopt professional services into their portfolio, particularly to save customers money on UCaaS deployment or earn vendor incentives.
However, Wilford said he doesn’t see a particularly large trend of advisors expanding in that way, whether in CCaaS or UCaaS. He said that for legacy Mitel and Avaya VARs pivoting their customers into the cloud, pro services make a lot of sense.
But as for agents? He’s not so sure. He said those who didn’t view those services as a core competency before probably won’t want to make that investment.
“I really don’t see a wholesale or growing trend of trusted advisors with no experience in pro services wanting to take that on,” he said. “They’re generally hunters. They go find deals. They help people with evaluations, and they move on. Their mindset generally isn’t going to shift to, ‘Now I want to be your tier one and your implementation person.’ For the incremental revenue that you’ll gain, there’s a lot of education experience that you’re going to need to be good at that.
Wilford expressed doubt over UCaaS providers’ appetite for training and certifying those types of partners.
“I think they want to be very strategic with who they bring into that fold. Because the implementation and the service that you get from the outset really set the stage for whether you’re happy or not,” he said.
Avant is working to prime its technology advisor base to sell with new customers and end users in mind in 2023. Pamlico-backed Avant heavily touted its investments in contact center as a service (CCaaS) and security last year. Now leaders in those practices say the technology services distributor (TSD) is working with supplier and seller partners to refine their sales strategies.
Avant’s Brent Wilford
Avant’s Stephen Semmelroth
For both CCaaS and cybersecurity, overarching initiatives reframe the types of people partners are engaging with in a deal. In cybersecurity, Avant is positioning partners to sell to people in a less traditional buyer role than the CIO. In CCaaS, the growing influence of Generation Z and millennials as purchasers and end users could shift customer engagements significantly.
Brent Wilford, senior director of CX and unified communications, and Stephen Semmelroth, senior director of security, sat down for a conversation with Channel Futures about the trends and initiatives in their respective space.
Go through the eight images above to read some of their takeaways on CCaaS and security.
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