McNicholas has experienced that shift first-hand. A former Nortel and Cisco reseller, McNicholas is largely viewed in the channel as a pioneer of executive and line-of-business selling. It happened almost out of necessity, he said, when in the early 2000s he noticed his close rate tapering off.  

“I was basically just smiling and dialing and out-hustling everyone,” McNicholas said. “I thought I was a great sales guy, but my close rate when from 80 percent to 20 percent over four or five years, and I was terrified. So I figured out pretty quickly that I had to sell completely differently.”

From there, McNicholas said, he started to tweak his sales strategy to target those higher up the executive food chain, pitching them more on cost savings and ROI than on speeds and feeds. The move, he said, paid off.

From 2001 to 2005, McNicholas headed up the western region Contact Center business at Cisco reseller NextiraOne, which has since been acquired by Black Box. Within a year-and-a-half of leveraging an executive selling approach, McNicholas said NextiraOne’s contact center sales shot up 180 percent, rising from roughly $1.3 million to $2.2 million. His team’s close rate, meanwhile, grew to north of 75 percent.

"[ERS] is not battlefield-tested,” McNicholas said. “It’s battlefield-built.”

In addition to the in-person training program, Comstor ERS arms solution providers with a number of other resources to help them evolve their sales strategies. Among them is a Software-as-a-Service offering that lets solution providers enter certain metrics about their customers’ data centers – such as server power consumption, costs per kilowatt and labor costs – and then “in under 20 seconds” turns that information into a PDF or PowerPoint presentation specifically catered toward executives.

“Understand this is not generic or homogenized. This is why this is radically different than [an ROI tool] a vendor would give you,” McNicholas said. “This will itemize over a five-year period, by year, how much, for example, we could lower [customers’] operational expenses, the percentage of data center costs we can reduce it by, and the specific FTE efficiency gain ... it’s very specific to each end customer’s business and data center.”

Scott Landis, president and CEO of VOX Network Solutions, a San Francisco-based solution provider, said ERS has definitely transformed VOX’s sales strategy and given it a leg up over competitors. 

“From a high-level perspective, it definitely has helped increase our revenue and really our profitability because it’s really elevated our game. When you are able to get in and have these conversations at the executive level and show the vale you are bringing, it helps.” Landis said. “And it helps us win more business in a competitive environment”

VOX even built upon the foundation of ERS to create its own white-labeled service called VOX Process Optimization Program (vPOP), designed to help organizations streamline their business processes.

“We have built some of our own tools and enhanced the overall process and put it into what we’ve branded vPOP, which is our process optimization program,” Landis said. “ERS is a component of our vPOP process, which again is really a conversation at the c-level where we really understand their business objectives and their company.”

McNicholas said a “few thousand” North American solution providers from 45 to 60 different organizations have completed the ERS program since its launch in 2009. The program today is available in 50 cities and 9 languages around the world.   

“We have seen a lot of heightened interest in it,” McNicholas said, “mainly because they know they’ve got their ladder leaned against the wrong wall.”