Can You Resell Without Being Influenced
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@bbigford said in Anyone looked at Yealink DaaS - Device as a Service:
@JaredBusch said in Anyone looked at Yealink DaaS - Device as a Service:
Yealink announced DaaS a while back. I know 888VoIP offers it, but as I don't do partner agreements and such to stay neutral, I do not have any pricing easily available.
Has anyone looked into this and happen to know any of the costs?
I've reached out to 88VoIP, but it is Saturday.
You can have partnerships and still be (mostly) neutral. When you do establish partnerships, you're really just saying you believe in their product enough to prefer it over a sea of others on a regular basis. We have several partnerships for VoIP and I just got started on a new Verizon Wireless one, so that we can try them out for a few things.
Having a partnerships just gets us access to better pricing (drives the cost down for the customer as well as we do pass some of that along, rather than just giving us good margins). But not every solution is a good fit, so we get good pricing and a variety of solutions to choose from.
Partnership doesn't imply being a reseller. You can be a partner without being unduly influences by the partnership. The same is not true of being a reseller. That changes things completely if you resell and are paid to prefer a solution rather than solely choosing it based on merit.
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@bbigford said in Anyone looked at Yealink DaaS - Device as a Service:
Having a partnerships just gets us access to better pricing (drives the cost down for the customer as well as we do pass some of that along, rather than just giving us good margins).
This is reselling, and if you resold at zero profit, it would be one thing. But that you are taking some profit (margins) on products sold, that means that you are getting financially influenced to like that solution. No matter how you approach this, it's impossible for a human to not be influenced by making profit on one solution and not another. To many customers, that's either acceptable or desirably (no one is sure why it would ever be desirable, but humans are illogical creatures), but it's literally impossible to remain neutral - that's why the vendor is giving you the margins, to ensure you are being "paid" to favor them over alternatives. It's literally a form of kickback to influence you and the only reason why that margin exists.
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@bbigford said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
When you do establish partnerships, you're really just saying you believe in their product enough to prefer it over a sea of others on a regular basis.
That's not really what that means. If you resell Chevy cars, it doesn't mean that you believe in them, it almost always only means that it was the best potential profit scenario that you were able to get. Not every product allows you to resell it (and many products aren't resellable at all), and not all have good margins. So companies reselling things normally is just a matter of combining what you can resell, what has good margins, and what is likely to sell well. What is good for the customer, or a good product, is rarely a direct factor as it makes no business sense for a reseller to consider that - it's simply an illogical place to be. Resellers are agents for the vendors, not the buyers. It's a conflict of interest to also represent the buyers (and in some industries like real estate, it's actually illegal to play both sides in that manner.)
Buyers and Sellers Agents in IT
For a reseller to consider what is good for its customer, they must ignore what is good for themselves. It's a conflict of interest between being good consultants and self preservation. It's not financially responsible for a reseller to not consider their own profits.
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I got nothing to add. This has been hashed out a few times in detail.
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I hate this so much... mostly because I have no say in things between the reseller and my boss when it has to do with products or services I'm not much involved in, but still effected by it. By the time my opinion on said product or service is asked for, the decision has pretty much already been made and discussed.
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@bbigford said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
You can have partnerships and still be (mostly) neutral.
A key to being kind of neutral is selling a large range of competing products. The biggest difficulty for resellers remaining neutral is that expensive products will essentially always trump free ones, no matter how good the free ones are, because there is no margin potential in the free ones.
Take, for example, a VoIP vendor that sells 3CX and FreePBX. While both cheap, one is completely free and one has margins. (Ignore the fact that 3CX makes you agree to not be honest about comparing them to alternatives as a reseller.) It's very difficult for a VAR to promote FreePBX equally with 3CX (even though most consultants see FreePBX as the superior of the two) because all profits come from the sale of the 3CX and none from the other.
With harder, this is much less of a factor. A reseller of Yealink, Snom, Grandstream, Polycom, and Sangoma desk sets will be trivially influenced by the margin differences between them as all have margins, none have huge differences in margins. So within reason, moderate neutrality isn't too hard to obtain.
So it varies widely by the product category, mostly by if there are big differences in margins between approaches.
This influence is what led to the rise of the SAN 3-2-1 Inverted Pyramid of Doom trend that was the bane of the IT industry for a decade. There was no business reason for that approach to have ever existed, let alone risen to prominence. But it had the best margins in the industry, so margins alone managed to overcome all industry knowledge to become the primary approach for a long time.
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@Obsolesce said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
I hate this so much... mostly because I have no say in things between the reseller and my boss when it has to do with products or services I'm not much involved in, but still effected by it. By the time my opinion on said product or service is asked for, the decision has pretty much already been made and discussed.
On the buyer's side, you mean?
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@scottalanmiller said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
@Obsolesce said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
I hate this so much... mostly because I have no say in things between the reseller and my boss when it has to do with products or services I'm not much involved in, but still effected by it. By the time my opinion on said product or service is asked for, the decision has pretty much already been made and discussed.
On the buyer's side, you mean?
Yes
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@Obsolesce said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
I hate this so much... mostly because I have no say in things between the reseller and my boss when it has to do with products or services I'm not much involved in, but still effected by it. By the time my opinion on said product or service is asked for, the decision has pretty much already been made and discussed.
which makes them the head of IT - just remind them of that.
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@Dashrender said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
@Obsolesce said in Can You Resell Without Being Influenced:
I hate this so much... mostly because I have no say in things between the reseller and my boss when it has to do with products or services I'm not much involved in, but still effected by it. By the time my opinion on said product or service is asked for, the decision has pretty much already been made and discussed.
which makes them the head of IT - just remind them of that.
Yup, refer to them as the CIO, or the "IT lead", or whatever descriptive title hits home that they are responsible for the IT decisions and failures.
