Sandler Partners, a technology solutions distributor, announced on November 10 that its Partners can email a question, a client invoice or an RFP to ScoutAI, an AI sales engineer it built in-house, and get a detailed answer within minutes.
What Sandler launched
Managing Partner Alan Sandler unveiled ScoutAI at the company’s National Summit in San Diego on October 27. The tool draws on insights from Sandler’s sales engineers, gathered from actual sales and installs, to help Partners pick the right Providers and solutions for their clients. Partners send requests from the same email address they use for the Sandler Portal, with no special formatting. ScoutAI is available only to Sandler Partners, and the release says Partners keep working with their Channel Manager and Sales Engineer as they do today.
Why it matters for channel sales
Alan Sandler said, “It’s an on-demand sales engineer for every Partner, anywhere, anytime, drawing on the experience of our entire engineering team, not anyone’s sales deck.” The design puts a distributor’s engineering knowledge behind an email address, so a Partner can scope an opportunity from a forwarded invoice before booking time with an engineer. We argued that vendors should give channel partners the certifications their own sellers hold, and other channel tools we have covered recently include Infiterra’s multi-distributor purchasing for MSPs.
What to ask
The release does not say which AI models ScoutAI runs on or how its answers are reviewed. Its FAQ says every recommendation is based on the best fit for the end customer. Providers that sell through Sandler can ask how their products are represented in the sales and install data ScoutAI draws on, since that data now shapes the first answer a Partner sees.
Source: Sandler Partners via PR Newswire
