Primarily focused on telecommunications, Luxfield Technology Solutions help organisations facilitate change and achieve their vision while optimising their performance and productivity. Working with organisations big and small, the company has deep expertise built from more than 30 years in business.
Looking to grow and scale their IT Business, the company kicked-off their Investible Partner™ journey. We sat down with Jon-Erik Orr from Luxfield about his experience so far, their growth, and the impact it’s had on their relationship with Microsoft.
Before starting your Investible Partner journey, what were you most challenged with?
Our biggest challenge was selling our products and solutions to our target customer.
We were finding it hard to build the right approach that would give us the best chance of success in our conversations. Coming from a sales background myself, I think there is nothing more difficult than taking a cold calling approach, so we needed a process that would help us be bold and confident in those calls.
We also needed help with putting together a go-to-market offer that we could actually sell!
When you first came across the Partner Elevate and the program, what were your thoughts?
When I first looked into the program and saw that it would be a 10-week commitment, I thought that I would be more than I could handle with my existing workload.
But once we got started, I quickly realised that you could move through at your own pace, and the time commitment per week easily fit into my schedule. It ended up being just a couple of hours per week to accommodate everything I needed to do which I felt was very reasonable.
Tell us about your journey
Well as I mentioned, I first thought it was going to be a lot of work. We didn’t have a proper solution in place that we could ‘use’ in the program, so I thought we would need to spend a lot of time to refine that before using it as our GTM offer within the program.
But, once we got started and were working through the program, it got easier when the modules were being broken down. It all came together when we started to focus on things like industry verticals and targeting only 1-2 customers in that vertical rather than everyone. The way we moved through the units, it made it very simple for us to take what we’d learned and pinpoint where we needed to focus our solution, and who we were chasing after.
Any surprises along the way?
I was surprised when we pivoted into different industries, outside of what we were expecting.
When we were developing the go-to-market offer for healthcare, we realised that the solution was relevant in other industries, too. When customers outside of healthcare came to us with the same pain points, we realised that our solution could be diversified – opening up a lot more opportunity for us.
Have you seen any results so far?
In relation to the struggles we had with selling solutions and products to customers previously, the program has helped us to grow those skills and handle objections in a way we weren’t able to before. It has also shown us the best way to get our sales offers out to clients in the most effective way. So that has been our biggest result.
The program has also helped us take the relevant Microsoft products and solutions and get them into go-to-market offers that we can actually use directly in market or through our distributors, too. During the sales process we are also less inclined to ask particular presales questions to Microsoft directly or our distributor, because we now know how to handle those better – which is a big win in the efficiency of our sales process.
Any final words?
I just wanted to finally say thank you to Des and team for putting together such an amazing program.
I have learned so much and the team has been extremely helpful during the program and especially in the momentum sessions, to make sure we were all on track and getting the most from the program as possible.
So, to any Microsoft Partner who is looking to grow and scale their business, I encourage you to reach out to Partner Elevate so you can learn more about what your path to Investible Partner looks like.
