Background:

After years of building a business centered around VOIP solutions and reselling large providers’ services, our client has become a trusted name for business telephony solutions in the New York metropolitan area. Their primary customer vertical was healthcare, and a few years prior earned managed telephony contracts with a few of New York City’s hospitals.

The timeframe is early March 2020 – the novel coronavirus was quickly moving from a single event out of China to worldwide news as a serious threat to all. The medical system in the US quickly began to take inventory of its capacity. This included ventilators and testing kits, but also basic technology and communication systems.

One of the hospitals that our client works with realized they were way behind on the deployment of their new phone systems, replacing the aging and outdated SIP solution they installed many years before. Now with COVID-19 patients beginning to show up in the Emergency Room of this end-user, they called with an urgent need for 200 new IP phones.

Issues:

As you may recall, March 2020 was a time of panic buying in the United States. The extremely fast and stealthy spread of the coronavirus had rightfully scared the whole country. Luckily, the hospital’s request was not for 200 rolls of toilet paper…our story would have ended there.

In this time of chaos, our client does what most resellers do – they revert to old habits and submit a request to the manufacturer. The current lead time was 6 weeks. Their channel rep called to remind them that 6 weeks is definitely not guaranteed, especially in these crazy times.

Their next option, of course, was the large channel distributors.

Ingram was sold out. Tech Data sold out. Synnex sold out. All the way down the line – sold out.

Outcome:

Erik, the Account Executive that manages the MSP’s relationship with the hospital reached out to Brett, his rep at B2X, and explained the need for 200 IP phones – pronto.

Brett immediately recognized the model of phones that Erik was requesting and 5 minutes later sent Erik an email with a quote attached. 100 phones are in stock and can be delivered tomorrow if we expedite the shipping. Another 100 units can be drop-shipped in 3 days ETA. The entire order can be filled this week.

Then Erik noticed the pricing was 17% less than the best price he saw at any of the major distributors. That discount in price basically doubled the margin on this opportunity. Erik took the bulk of that discount and passed it on to his customer, as well as covering the overnight shipping cost.

And with all staff at the hospital on high alert, the deployment of the phones happened in record time. Erik sent 2 of his engineers to assist the hospital’s IT staff to configure and physically drop each of the phones while pulling out the old system that was headed to the recycler.

The entire order can be filled this week.  And the pricing was 17% better than any other option.

Needless to say, the hospital was thrilled. They understood the challenge that this request and purchase order presented. They had multiple vendors unable to deliver other critical products due to disruptions in the supply chain.

Erik and his team shined – earning a nice order, boosting company revenue, and winning the mindshare of an important client during a time of mass uncertainty.

So, next time you need a distributor who:

• Has what you need in stock…
• Is committed to an extremely fast turnaround…
• And comes in at 10%-20% lower cost than large channel distributors…

Give us a shout, we’d love to help.