For companies in the technology solutions or managed services space, the Covid-19 pandemic and the movement of tens of thousands of workers to remote work situations has been hugely disruptive. With office spaces largely empty for nearly a year there’s far less need for the hardware and software that have been part of standard workplace operations for decades, which means a much tougher sales cycle for everyone in that business.
It is clear that the coming move to a hybrid work environment is going to transform how people work, but how companies judge what services and equipment they need to keep productivity at or above previous levels is still being decided. That is an environment where Vyopta is working to set itself apart and provide new business opportunities for its fast-growing community of partners.
“The one big problem they’ll readily tell you is that remote work is not good for their business, since most of these partners have made a living on selling things that go in offices, whether it’s software or hardware,” said Marc Haimsohn, Vyopta’s senior director of business development. “The fact that everybody’s at home is not good. So they’re looking at what’s out there and asking, ‘What do I do?’”
Vyopta’s inaugural Virtual Partner Summit was created to address those concerns and many more for partners. With Vyopta becoming more broadly integrated into its partners’ IT and unified communications offerings, its partner community grew by 75 percent in 2020 including 200 percent growth in the number of managed service providers.
The March 4 summit was created with three tracks to serve company executives, sales teams and sales engineers and help them find new ways to provide value to their prospects or existing client base.
The executive session will look at industry trends that can help organizations leverage collaboration intelligence to drive sales, increase customer retention and launch differentiated services. The sales track will help sales teams expand their influence and sales footprint with customers, and deliver more strategic solutions that lead to increased sales and higher customer retention.
And sales engineers will learn how to optimize specific new deployments or migrations and leverage analytics and collaboration intelligence to deliver better outcomes for customers.
Planning for what follows remote work
Haimsohn said the insights that Vyopta can provide into call quality and usage of collaboration tools will create new value propositions appropriate for partners to bring to the sales table during the time of remote work. And with the hour-long sessions intended to be highly interactive, peers from organizations in verticals such as finance, government, technology, healthcare, education, and pharmaceuticals can share their success stories that can be applied in other sectors.
“I want it to be interactive, where we hear from our partners about what they’re seeing, trends in the industry and what’s going on in the industry overall,” he said.
“We’ll look at how Vyopta supports sales motions, particularly around services, and how Vyopta can augment or help them launch a service offering around change management, adoption, or general managed services. These partners, almost all of them have had their business upended because of Covid because all the hardware they’ve traditionally sold is irrelevant because there is no one in the office Vyopta is this potential safe harbor of services and solutions that are still quite relevant.”
With the future of work looking more and more like it will be based around a hybrid model – somewhere close to a 50/50 split between remote work and in-office – Vyopta’s value becomes clear for companies trying to make the best decisions possible about how to manage their knowledge workers.
With detailed monitoring and analytics for unified communications and collaboration tools, customers will easily get an exact picture of how their workers are functioning and what technology problems need to be addressed by IT and UC teams to keep productivity from slipping.
“We’re going to end up with some people back in the office, with many people staying home for at least part of the week. So how do they how do they monetize that hybrid scenario and offer the most amount of value to their customers?” Haimsohn said.
“When people start going back to office, how do you make sure that they’re not crowding? They want to know how to make sure occupancy is appropriate and safe. And then how do you make sure people are productive and make sure they have all the right tools so they can they can work and collaborate with their coworkers appropriately?”
See what Vyopta can do for you.
