Onsite telecommunications solutions — costly to install and maintain — have long posed financial and logistical concerns for small- to medium-sized businesses. It should be no surprise, then, that hosted telephony solutions are experiencing huge growth. Market research firm Infonetics, in an article by Business Wire, predicts VoIP and unified communications services will grow from $68 billion in 2013 to an $88 billion market by 2018. New opportunities for selling solutions are also cropping up as the market grows. Infonetics’ research indicates “roughly 10 to 20 percent of new IP PBX lines sold are part of a managed service or outsourced contract.”
Whether you’re already selling onsite IP telephony services and want to diversify into cloud-based IP telephony or if this is your first venture into telephony solutions, there is plenty to get hung up on when building your sales strategy. The following tips will help you understand the unique challenges faced by businesses that implement and manage telephony solutions.
Sniff Around to Find the Hang-ups
Know going in that your potential clients might already face numerous issues with their traditional, onsite communication system. Companies might be running their telecom on legacy hardware purchased and set up by teams who are now long gone. Their systems might be managed by non-technical staff members who know how to do certain things — passed along through word-of-mouth, most likely — but don’t have any broad technical knowledge.
Point is; you might be walking into a glitch-filled system with the wide open possibilities of expensive and catastrophic telecom failures. When you’re getting to know a potential client, canvass the organization for information and discover what they have in place and what their issues are. Then, work with your technical team to determine what cloud-based solutions could be implemented to both remedy any existing inefficiencies and bring the system up to speed.
Sell More Than Just Telephones
Once you’ve made the case for an upgrade, it’s also important to make the company aware of the broader advantages that come with cloud-based telephony. Use those to further sell your solution. Not being hamstrung by aging onsite infrastructure is a huge selling point, and so is having phone systems managed and upgraded at an external data center, which takes the burden off of internal staff. Convenient, cost-saving and cloud-based services like Sharepoint and Exchange are becoming the order of the day in today’s workplace and can be integrated into an overall unified communications solution.
Deliver on Your Promises
As with any sales plan, showing your client deliverables with an agreed-upon timeline will go a long way in establishing client confidence and buy-in at every stage of the game. Some other ideas:
- Create phased roadmaps using what you know about the business’ existing communication infrastructure, technological capabilities and future communications needs.
- Quote costs.
- Come up with statements of work and mock deliverables to show exactly what you’re selling.
A unified communications plan may seem abstract to an executive team, so model real-life scenarios and use visuals to make the end-product clear. An executive may not have a deep command of telephony lingo but will want to know, when all is said and done, what is going to happen when he or she picks up the phone.
Learn more about the most effective way to organize your plays for selling telephony services by downloading the CompTIA Solution Sales Playbook for Cloud-Based Telephony. It’s a step-by-step walkthrough of how to approach telephony solutions, from sales to implementation and migration and beyond.
Kelly Ricker is senior vice president, events and education at CompTIA.
