The Best WLAN Product By Kevin Sandlin The best WLAN product does not always win. Just ask Apple about the 1980s and 1990s. Ask any startup IT company that built a superior product, but got beat in the market by the bigger, more established competition.

In the WLAN market, there are many players in the Small Office Home Office (SOHO), Small and Medium Business (SMB), and enterprise markets. All of these companies have legitimate products or they would not be able to survive very long, especially in the enterprise space. In the SOHO market, success is largely about buying shelf space so that your product is seen more often than your competitors’ prod-ucts in the Best Buy, Office Depot, and Amazon storefronts.

For companies in the SMB and enterprise markets, it’s all about the knowledge that distributor sales channels have about your product. It’s not enough that your SEs (sales experts) and VAR SEs (value-added reseller sales experts) “know wireless,” or that they are general IP networking experts nor is it enough that your SEs and VAR SEs know how to install and use your WLAN product.

Your SEs and VAR SEs not only have to know your product inside and out, but they have to know why your product is better than each and every one of your competitors’ products. No single provider’s WLAN solution can solve every customer need, so your SEs have to know all the technology behind all the products that are in their market space. In this way, they can understand where your product fits best, where it fits worst, and where it doesn’t fit at all. These SEs have to understand why your product is better than the competi-tion’s, not just the fact that your marketing team believes it’s better.

Your SEs and your VAR SEs must be the best trained in the industry. Microsoft and Cisco learned this lesson a long time ago. Microsoft removed Novell from the networking software market by training and certifying hundreds of thousands of MCSEs. What networking software does an MCSE recommend? Microsoft. Cisco took over the routing market, switching market, and by some accounts the security market through building (or buying) great products, and by educating their technical sales channel. The same paradigm exists today in the enter-prise WLAN Market. The best products do not always win, and the most innovative approach does not always win. The winner is the player with the best technical sales channel. According to Dell’Oro Group, the top players in the Enterprise WLAN market are Cisco, Aruba, Motorola, and Meru. All have great enterprise WLAN controller products. But what happens when they meet head-to-head at a customer site, with the customer asking why he should implement one or the other—or both?

The analogy is this: If you handed me the biggest, most highly featured and security rich router in the world, it would make a really nice door-stop. Why? Because I don’t have the slightest idea how to use it. Today’s high-end enterprise WLAN controllers can do some amazing things, but not without a properly trained administrator or engineer in the driver’s seat. Your product’s feature sets might impress potential customers, but equipment doesn’t buy or sell equipment: people do. Customers build relationships with your account managers (AM) and sales engineers (SE), not with a WLAN controller. A highly-skilled SE can take any good product and win a bake-off-provided the product in the bakeoff fits the customer’s needs.

The moral of the story is that the best product does not always win. The most thoroughly trained technical channel organization wins.

Dell’Oro Group also predicted that improved security, notebooks with built-in Wi-Fi radios, and the coming boom in mobile VoIP around the office will cause the enterprise wireless LAN market to more than double in revenue by 2009. That’s just a year away. Want a piece of that $3.5 billion pie? Invest in your technical sales channel by getting them properly trained. Right now, the most significant and consistent gap we see is the one between each vendor’s core design team and its field SEs. The answer is training. Invest in your employees, as well as your technology.

About The Author

Kevin Sandlin, Chief Executive Officer, CWNP is the primary business and marketing manager for Planet3 Wireless. Sandlin has twelve years of high tech marketing, management, business and product development experience. He developed the financial model and managed the overall process of the 1995 IPO of A.D.A.M. Software, Inc. Sandlin also managed the acquisition of TSI, a leading fax service bureau, by First Data Corporation (NYSE:FDC) in 1997. Sandlin was Director of Business Development and behind the re-launch of the Western Unionā??s worldwide internet services division. He holds a BA from Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, an MBA from Georgia State University, and management certificates from Kellogg, Fuqua, and Wharton business schools.

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