Type: Independent Sales Rep Opportunity
Industry: Information Technology & Telecom
Territory: United Kingdom
Commission: 7% + Recurring residuals
Vividly Simple Ltd provide friendly, jargon-free technology, communications and IT support for SME’s in the UK. Their monthly subscription services include:
- IT Help & Support
- Business Telephony
- Digital Signs
- Next generation Anti-Virus
- Cloud Backup & Restore
They are now looking to expand their reach in the Market by partnering with independent sales professionals who can introduce them to your existing networks or develop territories of your own.
High Commission And Residual Earning Potential
Sales Agents are free to target customers in any market sector. They offer a great return for a short sales cycle, and multiple services to ensure that reps always always something else to sell and help drive additional earnings.
If you sign up 20 companies, you can expect to earn between £20,000 and £30,000 in initial and residual commission.
If you have a base that allows you to sign up 50 companies, that figure rises to between £50,000 and £65,000.
Interview With Vividly Simple Ltd
Get to know more about selling Vividly Simple’s solutions by reading the interview below.
Where did the inspiration for Vividly Simple come from?
I’ve worked in IT and Telecoms for 25 years, and it’s fair to say neither industry has a particularly good reputation. To be clear, companies in both industries deserve their bad reputations, as it is their behaviour that has created them.
A desire to sell whatever products they have, regardless of whether it’s what the customer needs, and a desire to lock customers into long-term contracts to protect revenue, both show a lack of customer focus. In addition, smaller organisations have traditionally been poorly served, being too small for the larger IT companies to be interested in.
I set up Vividly Simple to offer affordable, jargon-free services and support to an audience of small businesses eager to be offered an alternative.
Tell us a little about your expertise in the IT and Telecoms arena, and about some of the work you have carried out to date
I started my IT career selling Apple Computers and networking, before moving to One 2 One, the mobile Network that became T-Mobile and subsequently part of EE. I held various Sales and Product Marketing roles, including head of International Business Propositions for T-Mobile across Europe.
I then spent more than a decade successfully leading teams bidding for major IT, Telecoms and Outsourcing contracts with private and public sector organisations, delivering a total of almost £1bn of directly generated sales revenue.
My expertise and focus is on customers and the customer experience, delivering products and propositions that closely meet the needs of a target audience.
What’s your greatest success story?
There have been a few great successes along the way … At T-Mobile I launched Europe’s first “Pay per Event” mobile services, and I went on to grow revenues from €178m in 2002 to €274m in 2004 for example, but I guess I would class my biggest win as my greatest success, beating the field to win a £240M IT Outsourcing contract with a global travel company.
What made you consider wanting to work with independent sales agents?
As a small business, we’re juggling ambitious growth plans with a desire to remain flexible and keep tight control over expenditure. We don’t have the resources to pay high salaries to experienced sales people, and although I’ve recruited and trained successful sales teams in the past it takes time.
By working with sales agents, we benefit from an experienced sales capability, we can take advantage of the Agents’ existing networks to generate rapid and sustainable growth, and we can link expenditure directly to revenue generation.
Why would sales agents have an edge selling your products/services?
We deliver Technology, Communications and IT in a way that appeals to smaller businesses who are poorly served by both IT and Telecoms sectors.
Four things set us apart from the crowd and make for a short, easy sales cycle:
- We speak a refreshingly simple, jargon-free language
- Our price points are set at “no-brainer” levels
- We operate rolling monthly contracts to remove the fear of being tied-in to long contracts
- We put our customers (and the Agents’ networks) at the heart of everything we do, to build lasting relationships based on excellent service.
What are you plans for the future of Vividly Simple?
We’re at the start of a really exciting journey, and we have ambitious plans for growth. Sales Agents with comprehensive networks form a key element of our strategy to drive organic growth across the UK, and we’ll be looking at potential acquisitions later in the year to help further expansion.
We’ll also be expanding our service portfolio as we go through 2018, to incorporate additional subscription-based services for small businesses … of course all very much inline with our core principles of simple, affordable and jargon-free, and with one-month contracts to make it easy for customers to give us a try.
Please describe the typical sales cycle and process to sales agents.
As I touched on earlier, our sales cycle tends to be very short. This is largely because we are able to describe the services we provide in simple, jargon-free language, and the benefits they deliver are immediately recognised by our small business customers.
When your services can solve big problems for customers, and the barriers to trying those services are low, it’s a winning combination. That’s why our price points are set at “no-brainer” levels, and why we operate rolling monthly contracts to remove any fear a potential customer may have of being tied-in to long contracts.
In most cases our sales cycle starts with a simple conversation. Whether that conversation is about solving a problem (and who hasn’t experienced a problem with their IT?) or creating an opportunity to stand-out on the crowded high street (as is the case with Digital Signs), it often takes no longer than ten to fifteen minutes to get the message across.
Customers are usually pleasantly surprised at the refreshing approach we have taken to delivering services, and in the case of our IT Help and Support proposition the next step is usually a formal proposal by email, which customers can accept online. The same applies to our next generation Malware Protection, although we might incorporate the one minute video demo that’s on our website as it tells the complete story very effectively.
Both Digital Signs and Business Telephony require a deeper dive into each customer’s requirements, but that’s important as by doing so we can make sure that the service is configured to deliver exactly what the customer is looking for.
We’re happy to provide support and additional expertise as required for these follow up meetings, and we create and send all proposals centrally – all the Agent has to do is give us customer details and the services they’re looking for.
When a customer accepts a proposal, it triggers the first invoice (services are charged monthly in advance), and an invitation to the customer to pay by Direct Debit. Almost all accept this invitation, which is great news because we get paid quickly … and that’s the trigger for commission payments to Agents.
How do you currently generate new business?
We undertake a number of activities to generate new business, including digital and postal marketing (followed up by outbound telephone calls), blogs and other social media content, and good old-fashioned face to face meetings and networking. To date the face to face networking has proved to be most successful, although we’ve just revamped our digital and postal content and we’re currently increasing activity around those routes to market.
Ask me the same question in 6 months’ time, and I’m sure the answer will be “we get most of our business through a fantastic network of independent Sales Agents”!
Ryan Mattock
Co-Founder of CommissionCrowd... Let's get disruptive!