Three Questions to Ask Potential Customers About SD-WAN
We recently asked a top-performing software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) vendor for some advice for partners that are looking to add SD-WAN to their portfolio. Sean Dublin, Director of Strategic Alliances at Aryaka Networks gave us a great starting point with three probing questions to help you identify potential SD-WAN opportunities.
How is your network performing financially?
The point of asking this question is to determine whether the customer makes network purchasing decisions based on cost or performance. If money is an issue for your customer, this information could allow you to segue into a conversation about how SD-WAN can eliminate hefty CAPEX and OPEX. If your customer is not too concerned with reducing expenses, you may want to focus on the other benefits that SD-WAN affords, such as enabling greater control over the WAN and allowing for rapid service deployment.
How extensive are your IT resources?
Next, you’ll want to get a better sense of your customer’s IT environment. Ask about how IT workers spend the majority of their time. For instance, are they typically rushing around answering trouble tickets? Find out how many workers are on hand, in each branch location. This could open the door to a conversation about equipment provisioning. You can mention how the process of deploying and configuring network equipment can take several months, which can be a nightmare for IT technicians who must also balance other responsibilities. With SD WAN, however, the same process can be performed in much less time.
What kinds of applications are you running?
It’s important to find out how many business applications are being used on a daily basis for videoconferencing, VoIP or data processing, for example. Ask how these services are performing and get a sense of how suited the business is for future growth. For example, the enterprise may be running three communications applications without a problem. But how would it fare with four, five or even six? The company could run into a major bandwidth shortage—especially if there’s potential for hiring more employees. Implementing an SD-WAN solution can allow an enterprise to scale its use of business applications without running into performance issues.
These are just a few questions you can ask to get a better sense of your customer’s needs. They are meant to help you converse naturally with your customers, so don’t worry about trying to force any particular question into a conversation. They are simply meant to identify potential openings that could help influence the decision to migrate to SD-WAN.
Here at AVANT, our partner enablement platform will help you learn to effectively position SD-WAN for your customer’s connectivity needs. Let’s start selling together today!