The VAR’s Dilemma: How to migrate sales and operations from a file based process to a record based architecture

One of great ironies of this time period in the Networking and Data Center Channel is that while ICT VAR’s are racing to capitalize on their customer’s migration of data, applications and business intelligence to the Cloud, many of their own operational processes rely primarily on decade’s old technology.

If you are a VAR, consider for a minute the fundamental advantages of driving your business processes with a records and transactions based system versus the file based system you use today.  What advantages come to mind first?  Data accessibility, security, auditability, scalability are surely top of mind.  But what if you dig a little deeper into the problem, what can we see here as the number one reason to stop what you are doing for a minute and look at applying your own expertise to your own business?
 

To me, the answer is simple: Profitability.  

And I can prove it.

Before we go too much further, let’s separate fact from fiction.  Your SaaS CRM subscription, such as Salesforce.com, which features a relational data base at its core with broad analytics built into the platform is a great step in the right direction; but not proof that your business is running on a record based architecture.  In fact, I often visit with the top Cisco Partners in the world, and you know what I see most of the time?  A whole lot of Excel copy/paste.  There is no better example of a file based system than that.  As soon as the VAR begins to show me their Excel templates, their copy/paste and export/import processes I know for a fact that they have not succeeded in migrating to a record based architecture in a relational database.

Here is a common example: the VAR is a Cisco Reseller Partner and logs onto Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) to complete a design and BoM for a customer.  Great, now Cisco has validated the customer design and, depending on your level of partnership, you may see your net transactional cost or at least your expected net price based on standard discounts negotiated as part of your program.  The data is right there on your screen; now how do you get that data into your business?  Excel export/import!  Even more troubling is that your Cisco Distribution Partner is now ready to send you a quote to buy the solution at their calculated net price, based on the electronically routed ConfigSet/BoM from CCW, and how do they send this data to you?  By Excel. Now you have two excel files, one from Cisco and one from Disti, let the copy/paste begin.  Sound familiar?

One more thought here to really drive home the issues with this process: every time anything changes during the lifecycle of the deal, which is often the case, you not only have to copy/paste again but you lose version control and introduce a myriad of new possibilities for errors to propagate.  It’s no wonder that your CRM opportunities have no real data in them, because no one wants to place the final BoM and cost in the system until after the deal is closed.  It is simply too much manual effort to keep up with.

Now let’s revisit profitability for a second.  How much time are your employees (and you) spending to copy and paste all of this data into any system of record such as your CRM, Quoting tool or homegrown cost analysis (which is probably also Excel)?  And as the data changes every time your customer changes the requirements, you have to update with CCW, get another Disti Quote and so forth, which means your employees are spending even more time running in circles.  You are throwing money (profit) away through payroll, and the errors that are introduced into the system can cost you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars; or even cause you to lose the deal entirely.

Worse still is that you still don’t know for sure the margin you will earn on the transaction, including the Cisco rebates and the internal costs to implement the solution.  You are guessing, and hoping that you guess correctly most of the time.  Now you may say that you don’t guess, that you really work hard to pour through each version of each Excel to ensure that Disti got the order right, and that your SE team was collaborating with your sales team on the right solution and the customer signed the quote.

You are OK, right?  Wrong!

You are in more serious trouble now than before you started because now you have scaled a file based system beyond its boundaries, and your critical financial data is scattered far and wide.  You may find yourself dependent on the contents of someone’s hard drive yet unable to find that person or the PC assigned to them. Where did all of that data go? How could you ever recreate it for an audit?  You relied on eyeballs for data integrity and people make mistakes.

Now imagine for a moment a system where a single click will automatically import the data from CCW into your database, where all data is organized in related fields and records. No more Excel copy/paste, just a single click to place all of your data where it is accessible to everyone in your organization who needs to view it or contribute to its optimization.  Imagine further that another click will download all of the Disti Quote data and then use computerized logic to instantly highlight the reconciliation issues that need to be addressed.  You may archive the Excel source of that data for audit and control, but never really need to look at the Excel file itself.

Where is this imaginary world of single click data integration?  For many years it has been in the hands of the very large Cisco Partners, who have very large IT budgets and lots of cooperation from Cisco.  That is probably why they are a real threat to your business, because their IT efficiency makes them more nimble, more able to negotiate profitably and more responsive to the customer because their data is literally at their fingertips. Too bad that you are not in this league of VAR’s, but what can you do?

Finally there is a solution and it is called StrataVAR.  Cloud based, subscription service software that seamlessly integrates all of your data from the Cisco Commerce Cloud to your system of record and platform.  Now the cloud is working for you.

Here in 2015, the technology landscape has experienced a complete paradigm shift to Cloud-based solutions and StrataVAR was created to take a fresh approach to the profitability challenges facing Cisco Partners and ICT VARs in general.  Returning your data back to you, after completing a process on CCW is now just a single click away.  This is not a CCW feature, but a StrataVAR solution to a pervasive problem facing every Cisco reseller except maybe those top 5 or 10 with the big IT departments.  Even there, by the way, their cost to build and maintain their own solution is a huge burden on their profitability too.

Let’s conclude on the subject of profitability.  If it were possible for you to eliminate all of the manual effort spent on copy/paste processes, what effect would that have on your bottom line?  If errors were eliminated at the same time, how much money would you save based on your past experience?  If Disti Quotes were automatically “married” to CCW Quotes, and red flags pointed you to the specific items of interest, how much time would be save and how many errors in disti fulfillment would be cured?  If your annual VIP rebate increased by 5%, what would that mean to your overall profitability?  If all of your Cisco Services data, such as SMARTnet contracts where to exist in your own database and accessible to anyone in your organization with authorization, or even extended out to your customers via a secure portal, how would that increase your profitability and customer satisfaction?

Imagine having an accurate and up to date sales forecast pipeline, including profit margin forecast.  Imagine a rich data base supported with intuitive reporting and dashboard graphics that displays your business at any given moment in time: past, present and future.  Imagine employees that are not buried under the weight of repetitive, boring and useless data copy and paste and spending their valuable time improving your customer’s experience and focusing on the real issues. Imagine the smart decisions you could make based on accurate information and the reduction of stress related to guesswork and late night excel manipulation.

Imagine proposing a modern, cloud based solution to your own business problems.  Call StrataVAR to learn how easy and affordable a migration to a record based architecture can be.

Imagine!!!

Ditch Excel for Automated Data Integration for CRM and Quoting Tools

In the 21st century, we can still see many platforms integrate with other platforms by way of Excel Export/Import.

As antique as it sounds, even in the very high-end of the high-tech industry, there are many critical business services that rely on the manual Excel Import.

As an example, Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) has the ability to Export the BoM in an Excel file that can be imported by the Cisco Reseller Partner's “other” systems (CRM, Quoting).

Let’s admit it, there may seem to be many advantages: it appears to be cheap, fast, easy, and anyone can do it. So why not?

The answer may be more complicated than “you get what you pay for”.

Here are the main reasons

1. You have to manually massage the Excel, remove any lines that are not relevant, rearrange, sort, select, filter, etc.
2. You need to make sure the format has not changed, otherwise GIGO
3. Excel from Cisco Commerce Workspace has many items that may not be relevant to your process, such as zero cost items
4. The most difficult issue is next version synchronization of lines – how do you know which lines were deleted, changed or added?
5. In CRM, such as SFDC, you need to split data between several objects such as Header and Line Items. Cannot be done from Excel.
6. Above probably true for many other systems, such as quoting systems
7. There is no track history or audit ability at field & line level
8. Need to consolidate Excel from various sources, such as Disti cost with CCW BoM
9. Error prone – obviously! Easy to make expensive mistakes
10. Expensive - if you add up the manual effort taken to use Excel, what seems simplest and quickest turns out to be the slowest and most expensive solution possible.

Contact StrataVAR for a complete ROI analysis of your data integration and find out why Commerce Cloud Integration for your Cisco Products and Services Resale practices can be vastly improved with cloud based, automated data integration. After all, its your Data, why isn't it on your Platform (with a single click)?

Why CRM for Cisco Partners Fails

This article examines the top five reasons why CRM implementation fails to deliver the intended solutions for the sales and business operations of a typical Cisco Reseller Partner.

Reason number one: “garbage in = garbage out”

Lack of automated data export/import dooms the CRM implementation at hello.  Cisco Partners must use Cisco Commerce Workspace and the resulting Deal is a commercial contract between the parties.

When polled, the Reseller organization’s number one expectation of CRM is to create and maintain an accurate sales opportunity pipeline and forecast.  Yet, the existing data in the ‘CRM Opportunities’ for 99% of all Cisco Partners is either inaccurate, out of date or simply garbage.  How can this be true?

It is true because when a Cisco Partner initiates the purchase process of a Cisco solution they are essentially required to use an internet portal called Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) to receive their transactional discounts, obtain special discounts, register for incentive rebates and validate the configuration.  The resulting BoM export from Cisco should be imported into the CRM Opportunity and updated every time the Deal changes until it is closed won or lost.  So where is the problem here?

Data integration between Cisco and the CRM is a manual process of data export/import and manipulation of .csv or Excel output. So it becomes painfully obvious that no sales and engineering team, no matter how dedicated, can keep up with the data integration performed manually. In almost all cases, there is not even an attempt to create an accurate Opportunity until after a sale is made and then the data is entered as a historical record. 

              Reason number two: Configured in CCW but Priced by Distribution

A profitable and successful Cisco Reseller must know the cost of goods sold, and one customer sale may involve multiple “buy side” transactions from multiple entities.

The Cisco Deal registered in CCW is the “single source of truth” in the reseller buy-side transaction and this data should be populated in the Opportunity to reflect what is intended to be sold to the Customer.  The reseller must associate this BoM with the net purchase price, which very often comes from a Cisco Authorized Distributor, such as Comstor, Ingram Micro or Tech Data.  This critical and often time sensitive data arrives from the distributor via email as an Excel attachment or embedded HTML.

Sometimes there are multiple buy side transactions to build a complete customer solution. The Cisco Partner’s sales operations process grinds to a halt as legions of pre sales, inside sales, sales engineers and account executives grapple to pull together the technical and financial aspects of this Deal.  Forget a forecast at this point, now you are treading water and hoping you don’t make a costly error that causes you to lose money on this transaction.  There is a good chance you are now working in Excel and ignoring the Opportunity in your CRM system.

              Reason number three: I have no Cisco product catalog

One of the top “assumptions” of a CRM platform is that it can be used to build a BoM in an Opportunity, but for a Cisco Reseller this is never an option because the data to do so does not exist in your local environment.

CRM is designed to fit any type of business and covers as many bases as possible, but it can’t do everything.  The Cisco Product catalog has well over 1.2M SKU’s and changes are made in real time.  It is impossible for a Cisco Partner, other than maybe one or two really gigantic ones, to maintain the Product Catalog. Therefore it is extremely problematic to take advantage of the rich feature sets in CRM systems.  The Reseller refers to the CCW export, which is a validated subset of the catalog that has been selected for purchase and resale to a customer; and the core problem of importing that data into the CRM Opportunity and keeping it current as the deal evolves. In most cases, this work is not performed.

              Reason number four: Adding CPQ (Configure/Price/Quote) software to fix the problem

Circumventing the CRM process to produce a Customer Quote fails to encourage adoption and leads to CRM failure for Cisco Resellers.  Good quoting solutions that integrate with your CRM are great, but they are not a panacea. 

Cisco Resellers who are failing in CRM turn to CPQ & Quoting Solutions to solve their problem. They are eager to believe that “CRM Integration” of the Quoting software will “make” the CRM effective; but in reality it is simply posting a rear view snapshot of the top line data of an opportunity that is likely well past the point of analysis in your CRM.  The export from CCW has now been put into the process at the time the quote is being created, bypassing the pipeline completely.  The CRM has failed to add any value at this point other than to be a very expensive general sales forecast tool, assuming the opportunity was created and some top line forecasted revenue was entered.

              Reason number five: Your CRM is not a Cisco Tool

Some critical data from Cisco and the Distributor is not available at all as an Export, and must be calculated manually.  Your CRM system was not made for Cisco Resellers but can be “programmed” to provide this critical data. The Cisco Reseller is highly motivated by additional profit margin to capture this data.

Wouldn't it be great if every time you downloaded a Cisco Deal to your CRM Opportunity, it also provided with the anticipated Value Incentive Program (VIP) rebate amount paid back to you by Cisco?  Wouldn't it be even better if that rebate was based on the actual price you paid to Cisco or Distribution too?  Your CRM is not a Cisco Tool and is not programmed to do this for you; and so when you really, really need to know the data, you turn to Excel.

All Cisco Partners consider their VIP rebates to be a critical part of their overall company financial performance.  Some offer sales commission on this as additional gross margin; and others do not.  Neither has any idea how much money they have at risk on any specific deal and their CRM Opportunity is not providing answers.  Strange as it sounds, when the Cisco rebate check arrives, there is virtually no way for the Cisco Partner to reconcile the statement against the company data, which should be captured in the CRM system.  If your CRM system is not helping you manage and optimize VIP then it is failing to deliver results.

              Some Conclusions:

We have looked at the five most common reasons that CRM implementations fail in Cisco Reseller Partner organizations, which are a large subset of ICT VAR’s, and concluded that:

1.       Without proper automated data integration between Cisco Commerce portals and Cisco Partner CRM platforms, the sales, operations and finance portion of CRM will not yield a proper sales forecast, profit margin analysis and many other basic business reports.

2.       Most Cisco Partners try to fix this problem with off the shelf or custom built CPQ and Quoting tools, which get quotes in customer’s hands but write back to the CRM only the most basic historical data, which does not pay for the cost of the CRM.

3.       Cisco Partners have very unique requirements that are not being met by off the shelf solutions from Cisco or the CRM & CPQ vendors.

4.       If the solution to the problem is not made essential and simple for the entire organization, there will be a lack of adoption and eventual failure. Expensive CRM licenses need to be adopted - quality and quantity of adoption needs to be high.

5.       Cisco Partners who solve this problem have a distinct market advantage over those who do not have the data.  Intelligence wins deals, and knowledge is power.  Controlling payroll costs by simplifying data integration has an immediate effect on the company bottom line.

6.       Most Cisco Partners are guessing at their profit margin per Deal and have no real way to amplify their participation in valuable Incentive Rebate programs.

If you are a Cisco Partner seeking a solution to these problems, please contact StrataVAR.

A message from our Founder and CEO, Raphael Epstein:

I began StrataVAR using my vision and experience in the Networking Industry Reseller Channel, where I founded a company called Netformx.  When we introduced our network discovery, design and quoting tool for Cisco and Nortel Reseller Partners, integrating the manufacturer's "single source of truth" for product SKU's and configuration rules, no one in the industry had seen such a powerful desktop tool before.  Netformx went on to be very successful and was sold to a Private Equity firm with plans for a public offering.

Now I see a much different landscape in the Reseller community, and the "pain" of doing business with large manufacturers, such as Cisco, has shifted to the B2B or eCommerce facet of the business.  Many large resellers have created their own IT solutions and are finding them very expensive to maintain and difficult to integrate securely with new SaaS offerings for CRM, Quoting and so forth.  Smaller resellers simply have to live without the information available to their larger competitors, placing them at a disadvantage and limiting their ability to grow market share.

StrataVAR leverages the emergence of internet cloud-based platforms such as Force.com and Salesforce.com to deliver time critical Manufacturer order and supply chain data to Resellers where they need it the most: in the formation, editing and quoting of customer sales opportunities.

I am proud to introduce StrataVAR to my friends and colleagues in the Cisco Reseller Partner Program!  

Once again, I have a solution that will save resellers lots of valuable time, reduce errors and duplication of effort and increase profitability.  And all of my former customers will be pleasantly surprised by the new price point from StrataVAR.

Visit our web site: www.stratavar.com for complete solution information.

Please give the application and try and let me know your feedback, thank you.