Transcript for CLP Central: Where Consultants, Vendors and the Channel Connect
Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I’m joined by the UCStrategies team of experts, and today our topic is CLP Central. Let me give you some background. Mick Sawka has worked with the UCStrategies team to bring a group of consultants to the UC Summit every year since the beginning. He’s done a great job, and over this period of time, Mick and I have said, wouldn’t it be great if we could deliver services for the vendors and the consultants or a group of vendors who just aren’t in a position to be able to afford a complete Consultant Liaison Program. And that’s what we’ve strived to do. We’ve been working on this for about a year and a half. And we think we’ve got a program pretty much put together that’s really going to help the industry, help the consultant community, and particularly help those vendors who would really benefit from having a Consultant Liaison Program to enable this to happen.
Let me give you a little example. I’ve sat in on a couple of sessions at the UC Summit, where a vendor had a group of consultants in the room, and at the end of the conversation, consultants would go up to the vendor and say, “You know, I actually have a product opportunity for you right now, with one of my clients.” And this has happened on a very, very regular basis to a point that we know that it’s very valuable and a lot of the vendors will ask only to have consultants be part of their focus sessions at the UC Summit. So we know that there’s an opportunity. I’ll turn this over to Mick Sawka, who can give us a little more background about what the program is, and also, I think, really important as to why the consultant community is really so important. Mick, over to you.
Mick Sawka: Great – thanks, Jim. Let me just start with, CLP Central really is a response to two or three trends that we’ve seen over the past oh, three or four (maybe more) years. One of those trends is as the industry has evolved into things like unified communications and cloud services and network infrastructure, we’re just seeing more and more vendors that are recognizing the role and influence a growing community of consultants have in this industry. And the opportunity for them to leverage this influence almost like a channel to market, but certainly as an influencer group that could help vendors, increase their awareness, increase opportunities through a consultant’s recommendations and so on.
One of the major challenges that these vendors have is they’re unable to allocate dedicated head count, resources, or budgets necessary to develop and manage what are commonly called a “Consultant Liaison Program” in this industry. So CLP Central, first and foremost, can reach out to those vendors and very cost effectively help them initiate and start a consultant program: recruit or engage the right consultants; increase awareness through various services we could offer like messaging and (provide) a portal of information that we know consultants look for on vendors, as well as the ability to track to what degree our consultants are considering and recommending any of the vendors that participate. So it gets them started, it then allows them to allocate whatever resources they have to go out and more proactively engage the right consultants that CLP Central will help them find, and it gets them going. So certainly we’re not out to outsource or manage programs for them, but really to help get them started.
Similarly, we have found that there are a number of vendors out there that do have consultant programs, but similarly have resource and head count allocation challenges, and they would also – and they’ve even told us – would look to CLP Central to help them with certain back room support type requirements for their program, allowing them again to be out and be face-to-face in engaging the right consultants that they can work with more closely. So that’s the primary benefit we see to a growing number of new vendors in this area as well as the established vendors.
On the consultant side, similarly, the way that we define and the way we will qualify consultants for CLP Central, is this community of independent vendor-neutral consultants, hired by enterprise mid-market and SMB-type organizations to come in, and they typically range from working with their clients to conduct upfront strategic planning, an overview of the client’s technology infrastructure for example, to a more in-depth user needs assessment, all the way through RFP management, recommending what vendor solutions that would best meet their needs and even help support the deployment of that solution. So those are the consultants that we will work to bring into CLP Central. Because we believe that the more we could help the consultant community understand what is the breadth of vendor solutions out there, who are the up-and-coming vendors; the ability to number one, help them bring more options to their clients and therefore increase the value of their services. Or there may be some areas like cloud services or in-building wireless, or some areas where consultants may not be engaged today, that by learning more from vendors what each of these market segments entail, and how they could bring more value to their clients. By signing up for and working with these vendors consultants can even expand the services they offer.
So those are the two primary groups that CLP Central will focus on first. And our goal is to really help the vendor community and the consultant community learn more about each other, work together more effectively on behalf of their mutual customers.
Jim Burton: Thanks, Mick. Let me turn this over to Marty Parker; here is a consultant. Then I’m going to turn it over to Steve Leaden, another consultant, to get their input on this. Marty?
Marty Parker: Sure, Jim. Hi. Thanks, and thanks to you and Mick for creating this program. It will be very interesting to see it appear and to experience it. Obviously this will be a great service to those vendors who do not have an active consultant program and perhaps it will provide some value as Mick was saying in terms of a normalized view across vendors. So I think it will be a nice blend. I would expect that consultants who specialize in certain areas, whether it’s certain types of solutions or certain sizes of enterprises or certain vertical markets, will still go directly to those Consultant Liaison Programs provided by the vendors, simply because they’ll get an unfiltered view. And they may want to see both views – both the CLP Central and the unfiltered view – to increase their perspective.
But I think this has a lot of potential and I look forward to experiencing it. Thanks.
Jim Burton: Thank you Marty, Steve Leaden? What are your thoughts?
Steve Leaden: Jim, there’s a lot of things going on in the industry in general, a lot of activity obviously. And as independent consultants we’re seeing just a lot of activity with clients and enterprises asking for help from the consulting community. And there’s a lot of interesting talking points around the consulting community in general; many vendors in the past have really not realized the value of the consulting community. They don’t really look at the consultant as an influencer or a potentially direct or indirect sale. Just a couple of quick stats: consultants have influenced over $30 billion in telecommunication sales, the average dollar value exceeds $8 million a year; 80 percent of consultant clients are in the Fortune 1000 or equivalent areas. And consultants are involved in 88 percent of all buying decisions, especially at the larger level. So it’s very interesting just with those few stats there, to see the potential level of influence and dollar value that the consulting community brings. As we’re seeing programs grow and some actually shrinking at the moment, I think the value of a program like this, especially for companies that really don’t have any existing consultant program, that are now entering the telecom space (Sonus being one for example), they’re growing, they’re an SBC company, they see a value to the consulting community, but really don’t know how to attack it. I’m not sure what particular companies like a Sonus really have even the dollars to put in a full-time group of individuals to manage such a program. But the ideas of CLP Central, I think, brings that into play.
So the other thought too, is that consultants are a little bit of a different breed than your traditional sale. Not all sales people really know how to sell to consultants, they are a customer just like any other customer. And they can definitely substantially affect any sales person’s annual figures. There’s a sales person we work with within our firm that within the last three years we’ve helped influence at least $10 million in sales with this particular sales person. So again, consultants can in general be that influence. In my opinion, I think the biggest value that CLP Central will bring is there is – especially for companies that just don’t have an existing program – they can provide that niche. It can be a low cost entry from what I understand, and it will for sure increase the awareness of the role and the influence to the consultant community. And I think it will be, again, that entrance from barrier to help with the relationship build, with the awareness of the manufacturer that’s being supported here; and with the consulting community involved as well.
And of course you always have to balance that with the existing CLP programs that are out there as well as associations out there that have influence within the consulting community, such as the Society of Telecommunications Consultants in the U.S., and CTCA in Canada. So with that said, I’m very excited, Jim, that you guys are launching this and I think it will really increase the value – especially to the manufacturer’s that really have a need for something like this, but just haven’t able to afford CLP programs up until now.
Jim Burton: Thanks a lot, Steve. I would like to go back to you, Mick, and ask one question, because it seems to me that one of the most important values that CLP Central will deliver is the ability to recruit consultants to join the CLP program. How big is your database so people can get a really good appreciation for the opportunity of recruiting consultants to be part of their programs?
Mick Sawka: The database that we’ve been building and managing for over 20 years, in the mid 90’s is when we started the tracking the consultant community and building this database of consultants. Let me just reiterate that we go through great lengths to qualify all the consultants that register for our database, again as independent vendor-neutral consultants. We’ve grown the definition from your more traditional telecom consultant to a broader-based information and communications technology consultant that will range from premise-based solutions to cloud solutions to network infrastructure, to business continuity and disaster recovery. And right now, the database which we’ve done a lot of work on over the past year, in total, is comprised of roughly (round numbers) 6,000 firms that comprise about 9,000 individuals on a global basis. And roughly 55 percent of those right now are in North America. The vast majority in the U.S. – but we’ve made some pretty good inroads over the past 12 to 18 months in building that database in various countries in Western Europe, APAC, and we’re starting to crack a few countries in Latin America as well.
Jim Burton: Great. Thanks a lot Mick. Art, you always have a lot to say about these subjects, give us your thoughts on CLP Central.
Art Rosenburg: Well, I think that it has to support where the technology is going and the technology obviously is converging. And it’s not just communication applications, it’s business process applications that are being integrated. And these things being done provided as services to end users wherever they may be, inside or outside an organization. So as a result, there’s an ongoing need for expertise to manage the progression from starting with whatever they’ve got, legacy systems and so on, but expanding it to UC-enabled applications, either premise-based or different forms of clouds. And it’s an ongoing process. And just like we tell the channel partners: you’ve got shift your business model, you’re just not making a one-time sale, you’re going to be supporting on a subscription basis because people are going to use this all the time and things will change all the time. And I see that as being the same thing that the CLP can do for the consultants who should be available as specialists in various verticals or particular technologies, on an ongoing basis. So it’s not the one-time sale business anymore, it’s on-going usage basis.
Jim Burton: Great. Thanks a lot, Art. The role consultants play today, particularly compared to the role that they played over the last few years, it seems to be more important than it ever has been. It seems like major customers are turning to consultants for help in making UC decisions.
Mick Sawka: Following up on what Art was just saying...and it’s been a trend. We also in our database have the consultants classify what type of consultant they believe they are. And years ago when we first started, a very high percentage was your traditional “telecom” consultant, or premise-based communications equipment-type consultant. And today, as of this past year from our most recent study, now it’s roughly 50/50 where about half the consultants in the database would still classify themselves as a telecommunications consultant. But the other half range from information technology to unified communications, to business process and/or management consultants as well as technology consultants. So we’re seeing that kind of shift that Art was referring to in the consultants in the database.
Jim Burton: Thank you for everyone’s input today; I really appreciate it. CLP Central is now live. There’s a lot of information on the site, this is a pre-launch. The actual launch will happen at the end of January next year. This launch is to let people be aware of it; let the consultants get registered; let the vendors understand what opportunities there are for them. And you can always reach out to Mick or myself for more information. With that, thank you everybody and we’ll see you again next week.