Blog Entry
As Managing Director of Novell Africa, Graham Hallworth is solely responsible for sales in the huge -- and sometimes difficult -- territory of continental Africa (excluding South Africa). Based from his home office in the UK, Graham faces the constant challenges of finding the right customers, developing the right partners, and delivering the pre-sales resources he needs to grow his business. When your sales territory is an eight-hour flight away you want to make the most of any tools available that can help you to operate in an efficient, cost-effective way.
Graham recently discovered the combined power of the Utopia Demo System delivered via the Novell Online Demo System, or NODS for short. Utopia is Novell's standard sales demo environment, and NODS delivers Utopia demos by hosting them on the internet, for access via remote control. With a small amount of informal training, Graham last week successfully gave an Identity Management demo to a customer in Nigeria. He got the local partner to visit the customer's site and login to the demo on NODS, while Graham drove it from his laptop in his UK home office. Both the partner and the customer were blown away by what they saw, and Graham was able to progress a sales opportunity -- and a partner relationship -- without the cost and time involved in traveling to site himself.
Graham said, "The savings are huge. $1,200 for an 8 hr flight. Hotel accommodation 2 nights at $180. Transport and meals lets say in total the trip would cost $2,500 and we can do it for free and see if the client likes it before we spend the money on visiting the client and progressing the opportunity further, for example to a Pilot."
Whether your customers are an eight-hour flight away or just in the next city, you should investigate how Utopia & NODS can enable you to ramp up your demo activities while helping keep your travel costs to a minimum.
Find out more here:
Utopia wiki 
NODS wiki 
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