#CHRIS DOWNIE FULL#
To get the most out of their independent broker, dealer, and partner channels, they assigned dedicated channel managers in each of those market territories.Īdapting the coverage model to sell the full value of the Flexential platform was another challenge. His sales team assigned the sales reps to those territories and allocated their focus 50% on customer acquisition and 50% on account development. One way Flexential changed their go-to-market formula was to create sales territories to align selling resources with the fastest growing cities in their national footprint. Since the transaction we’ve created a national platform that made our data center product in particular relevant to larger, national enterprise and technology consumers.” “As independent regional businesses we sold in a more localized fashion - just selling into their local communities. “We've been evolving our go to market for the last several years since we put the two companies together,” he continues. To unlock the next level of growth, Downie and his team have made changes to the sales force design and go-to-market formula. Other customers can be very sophisticated about outsourcing their IT infrastructure and will be trying to leverage more virtualized compute resources like cloud and be interested in the flexibility we offer,” according to Chris. Some clients could be at the early stages of maturity and just getting out of a telecommunications closet in their office, which has no redundancy or resiliency. For example, we’re investing a lot of time making sure that our revenue team is positioning our product sets appropriately to the right audience and our audience could be at various stages of their journey of really consuming what we do. “We are in a capital-intensive business, so we focus a lot on our return on assets and the return we get on investment capital – which is north of 20% for us. I think of our sales machine as a growth asset, and we invest in developing our sales and channel resources and training them is central to our go-to-market approach and delivering our value proposition to customers. “Sustainable growth helps you earn the capital and capacity to expand.”Īs CEO, Downie brings that capital investment mentality to the way the company manages its growth assets and investment. “Growth provides us access to capital,” he continues. We can take advantage of both secular growth in cloud computing and the big shift to remote work, hybrid work and networking from anywhere in the wake of Covid-19,” says Downie. “We are still in the early innings for the data center industry, and Flexential is on the leading edge of that. In addition, Chris points out Flexential is a market leader in a young and growing industry.