Selling the Superior SonicWall Gen 7 Solution
You’ve armed your team with the knowledge they need to propose and deliver the most appropriate SonicWall Gen7 upgrade solutions. It’s no mystery that other SonicWall partners have done the same. Have you developed sustainable competitive advantages that clearly establish a preference to obtain these solutions from you? Here’s how to go about identifying your SonicWall “Secret Sauce.”
Ask your team this question: “What is it that we do that none of our competitors do?”
The answer may be trickier to find than it first appears. Collect your team members’ answers on Flipboards. If yours is like most teams they’ll identify dozens of qualities for you to write down. That feels great.
But…
Now go to each thing you’ve written and ask the team if they can honestly say that none of your competitors have that quality or do that thing. More than likely they’ll admit some competitors do that too. Scratch that off the list and go to the next. And the next. And the next.
When you’re done, don’t be surprised or dismayed if you’ve crossed out literally everything you wrote down. If there’s even one you can’t scratch off, congratulations! You’ve just identified your sustainable competitive advantage -- your differentiator. That which sets you apart from your competitors.
That’s major!
Sharpen Your Focus to Your SonicWall Practice
SonicWall continues to innovate along two important vectors.
First, we continue to improve all our products and introduce new models year after year after year. Business requirements keep growing and changing. Technologies continue to emerge allowing us to innovate new features, capacities and capabilities. In Gen7, we’ve multiplied sheer firewall, DPI and IPSec performance by four times! We’ve increased the maximum number of concurrent connections by 15 times, dramatically improving scalability. More ports than ever before. Expandable memory. Redundant power. Increased VPN and VLAN connections. USB and wi-fi capabilities. We’ve added much.
Second, we provide a wide enough selection of firewalls to accommodate any customer no matter their size, bandwidth demands or other requirements. Between the TZ, NSa, NSsp High-End, and NSv series you’ll find an ideal fit for any customer environment.
These Products Only Deliver Value When You Step In
Your customers will only enjoy value from this broad selection of offerings when you help them identify the ones that suit them best, help them procure them and then install, integrate and implement them. You are the element that activates all of the value.
The first thing you need to do is to clearly, crisply define and describe why your customers should obtain these excellent solutions through you rather than your competitors. What makes you better? What makes you preferable? What makes you special?
Sound Familiar?
Yes, you now need to repeat the earlier exercise and ask your team: “What do we do that makes us the preferable choice for our customers to deploy their SonicWall solutions?” List the qualities everyone calls out, then visit each one and ask if none of your competition does the same. If some do, scratch them off. Keep reviewing until you’ve reached the end of the list. Whatever is left is your unique “SonicWall Secret Sauce.”
It may be in how you go about calculating their bandwidth requirements or port density. Perhaps they have applications that require specialized handling. Perhaps your track record for successful implementations stands out. Perhaps you’re just better at explaining technical issues to non-technical people. Your results will most certainly vary.
Warning: This Exercise May Be Hazardous
Companies who have performed sustainable competitive advantage analyses often acknowledge how painful the process was. It requires extreme candor and honesty. But the reward can be huge as you identify that which makes you special and makes you better. When you take that message forward into the field, it feels great to have your chambers fully loaded.
Everything SonicWall does is meant to give you plenty of resources to apply to your focused sustainable advantage. Your SonicWall practice is yours and yours alone. Involve your SonicWall Channel Representative to help you develop this. They’ll bring a great perspective on what all your competitors do and will help you achieve the objectivity required to identify your true advantage.
Also, check out our concise seven-episode video series highlighting the benefits of upgrading your customers to Gen 7. Simply choose your region and language below.
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An Article By
An Article By
Chirag Saxena
Chirag Saxena
