Prospecting and qualifying

New: Prospect Qualification Matrix Template (.doc)

When talking with an organization about introducing Elfiq's products, here is a set of questions you can ask to dig deeper with the customer to identify an opportunity and recommend the right model.

1- Prospecting questions

• Have they experienced any outages?  If so how long?  What were the soft/hard costs associated with the outage? This is critical to make the prospect realize that his pain can be solved.  A good tool for analysis is Elfiq's ROI tool.
• Are they experiencing saturation with their current bandwidth solution at peak business hours?
• Are they spending too much on bandwidth? Assessing their existing agreements is a great way to make them realize they can do more with less, especially with low-cost carriers such as DSL and cable modem providers.  Many use "multiple bonded T1's" which end up being very expensive for the bandwidth provided.
• Are users complaining? 
• Are customers complaining when accessing the organization's online services?
• Are they losing business when the Internet goes down?
• Are they losing productivity when the Internet goes down?  This is especially critical in service-based organizations such as law, finance and accounting
• Do they have any idea of the traffic happening on the network?   Do they have a means to control traffic on their network?
• Do they have a backup link?  Is it only a failover link on a router?  Many organizations have only a "manual" failover or a router performing the task but not utilizing the bandwidth of both links.

2- Qualifying questions:

• Question: How many ISP links will your organization implement in the next 3 to 24 months?
  • The # of ISP links is critical in determining the right model for the prospect
  • If you can get the mid/long term needs, you can upsell the equipment 
• Question: What is the throughput of each ISP link?  (upstream and downstream)
  • Critical metric to make sure you don't undersell the customer
  • Make sure you get the long term forecast as well (will they increase the capacity of certain links?)
  • Our units are rated "half-duplex" which means maximum speed upstream or downstream, not both.  "Full duplex"  means combining both metrics.  Some competitors will specify only full duplex.  Example: the LB-1500 is rated 90Mbps half-duplex, 180Mbps full duplex.
• Question: Are your WAN components (Firewall / Switches) in failover (high availability) mode?
  • Yes: then propose LB-1100E and up for failover kits, your customer is likely to wish to match the high availability strategy from the firewalls with the Link Balancers
  • No: LAN Failsafe can be the prefered method for the prospect, providing a failsafe for the failsafe
• Question: Are your offices connected via VPN and if so, would you like to use multiple ISPs at each office?
  • Yes- SitePathMTPX opportunity
  • No - single balancer with failover for VPNs via iDNS