Specialty Distributors Raise Their Voice

Catalyst Telecom, a division of ScanSource, and Voda One, the Avaya sales division of Westcon Group, have both launched programs to promote and educate resellers about Avaya's latest line of midmarket-focused products, the S8400 and S8300 platforms targeted toward the under-1,000 user space.

Catalyst has teamed up with Avaya on its Drive program, designed to educate and train resellers on implementing and selling the Avaya products.

The Drive program, launched in early April, identified resellers from Greenville, S.C.-based Catalyst's customer base who were authorized to sell the Avaya midmarket or small business products and created a program that incorporates sales, technical and marketing training.

So far, sales have been slow but the distributor expects that to pick up in the second half of the year as more solution providers become qualified to sell the products, said Chris Marlar, director of merchandising for Catalyst.

Midmarket companies can be challenging sales because they don't have the funding or resources of an enterprise and they're not quite as nimble as a small business, Marlar said.

"They're in that in-between. They need to be very prudent where they're investing their dollars but they need to get the most impact for those dollars," he said.

The sales cycle is about 90 days and resellers trained in the first wave of the program should begin closing deals this summer, Marlar said.

Meanwhile, Voda One is also offering training around Avaya's midmarket line. The Omaha, Neb.-based unit of Westcon Group is holding two-day training sessions around the country on the small-business-focused IP Office and midmarket MultiVantage Express solutions.

"We're really focused on helping sales reps sell higher and wider in midmarket opportunities," said Tim Kubiak, director of strategic development at Voda One. "This came from a lot of dealer feedback and demand for training."

Much of the training focuses on helping new reps learn how to more effectively sell the products, he said. Training is also available through the distributor's ConvergencePoint program.

Jarrod Sipe, president and owner of Matrix Technologies, Herndon, Va., a Voda One customer that focuses on the midmarket, said that the Avaya products are a good fit for his customer base.

"In the last two years Avaya has done a much better job going after the midmarket with their pricing flexibility and the way they've changed their infrastructure and charge on a per-user basis. Avaya has become a lot more competitive in the midmarket space," Sipe said.

The only piece of the business where Avaya still needs to focus is around developing services offerings for the channel to support customers, he said. "Avaya has typically wanted to service the customer direct, but now that voice is only an application on the network and it's only a piece of the data network, customers don't want to go to a separate company for that. Avaya still has some holes there, but once they get that fixed they're very strong," he said.