How Milner is Helping its Customers Improve Workflow through NSi Autostore
“There are seven words you never want to hear in business: That’s how it’s always been done here,” says Patrick Sutton, Milner’s sales manager. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
Keeping pace with the technology industry’s exponential growth is a tough task. But Milner’s commitment to continuous training leaves Sutton without worry. “Our director of training does a great job of working with manufacturers and our internal subject matter experts to teach the new technologies to our salespeople.” Frequently, Milner’s staff is armed with up-to-date information for all the products they sell.
To Sutton, successful salespeople see themselves more as business consultants. “Selling isn’t telling,” he said. “Selling is working together to solve business issues. A good salesperson knows the answer, but doesn’t give the answer away—he or she leads the client to the answer by working together.” But the philosophy only complements what’s really important. Sutton believes in a core set of abilities which make a great salesperson. “I would want them to be motivated, to be experienced with the products. I want them to have the ability to express and share new ideas to a C-level executive to help bring profit to their organizations.”
Atop the list of Milner’s hottest selling products is NSi AutoStore (from Nuance Communications), a solution that captures, processes, and routes paper and electronic documents into a company’s workflow. One of his biggest selling points for AutoStore is the time and money it can save his clients. “Our No. 1 goal is to leverage technology to automate manual processes that are eating away at profits.” That’s what it is all about when Sutton works with its clients, which leads an organization to conclude that theyneed the solution.
When Sutton identifies key issues, his approach is subtle. He avoids throwing the kitchen sink at his customers. “When we talk about improving their business, we focus on the relevant bits that can make an impact. You could say we are selling the features, not the product—people don’t buy a drill because they want to own a drill, they buy one because they want a hole.”
For instance, Sutton’s probing may reveal that a company’s major pain point lies in its accounts payable department. Perhaps the department struggles with organization and the horrors of illegible documents, resulting in unaccounted funds or lost revenue. “In that case, we would focus on AutoStore’s image clean-up, indexing, and routing features” said Sutton. “I would explain how AutoStore can remove noise that affects the readability of invoices, thus ensuring accurate billing or payments.” As for addressing organizational issues, he explains how costly human error can be. “AutoStore won’t make the same mistakes people do. It will index and classify document, then send it to the appropriate person for further processing.” The focus is on getting the job done right on the first try.
“When we talk about improving their business, we focus on the relevant bits that can make an impact. You could say we are selling the features, not the product.” –Patrick Sutton
Part of Sutton’s sales strategy is a product of Milner’s value proposition. “We own our own software company—we have our own managed IT services,” he said. The sales team embraces the advantage. Certainly, customers can go down the street and save a couple of dollars with one of Milner’s competitors, but like any salesman will tell you—you get what you pay for. “We sell our customers on the superior service you get with Milner’s MPS practice. If you have one of our MFPs, and you call us and say your machine stopped working, we escalate those calls to our managed IT helpdesk and they can fix it, sometimes remotely which minimizes downtime.” One of the greatest weapons to have is the one no one else has. Milner uses this to its advantage and implements it directly into its sales strategy.
“While most of our customers are leaders in their industry, oftentimes they don’t have the internal resources to focus on improving technology along with processes,” said Sutton. That’s where the Milner sales team comes in: To help organizations—regardless of their level of success—to squeeze every last drop of profit. You either get busy selling or you get busy dying.
