How to Sell Unified Communications

Unified Communications is a set of tools and technologies designed to speed and streamline communications activities. Isn’t it therefore ironic that selling Unified Communications often becomes an extremely complex and extended process. There are so many things to talk about – feature-rich technical components, mobility, collaboration, unified this and that, presence, audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, web conferencing, hardware-based and software-based solutions (and plenty more where that came from) – that the poor customer is often left with his head spinning…

When asked what will persuade them to invest, customers typically give similar answers, “Show me where it saves me costs from my budget or where it makes me money”. Now we all intuitively know that being able to see peoples’ presence status should make communications processes more efficient. We know that unified messaging should allow employees to spend less time checking their messages, freeing them up to do something more important. However, providing a compelling demonstration of how this translates into real cost savings from an individual’s budget or additional revenues for his company can be a real challenge.

The reality is, if your customer thinks it is too complicated, too risky or the Return on Investment (RoI) isn’t clear and compelling they’ll either postpone making a decision or they won’t buy at all, neither of which will help you in making your targets. So, if the challenge for salespeople is to simplify the move to UC, minimise risks and demonstrate a compelling RoI… how can we help you to achieve this?

I believe that focusing on simple applications, capabilities and improvements is key to selling a complex proposition such as UC – that way everything becomes much more straightforward. Ask a lawyer what it would mean to him to be able to charge accurately every client call he makes, and he’ll tell you. Ask the owner of a fast-food outlet what its worth to him to be able to find cover automatically when staff don’t arrive for work, and he’ll know. In both cases, the benefits of these simple UC capabilities are extremely clear, and demonstrating Return on Investment becomes very easy. Not only that; the Payback Period can often be very short – another vital consideration in today’s economic climate.

Focusing in this way gives you an easy way to engage with the customer and demonstrate your involvement with their problems and business issues, as well as enabling you to offer simple solutions that deliver rapid RoI. These applications can then be the gateway to further business opportunities as you start to introduce mobility, conferencing and some of UC’s more advanced capabilities once the trust has been built.

Selling Unified Communications is easy, so don’t make hard work for yourself when you are looking for business. Learn how to do it the easy way. You’ll make more sales, and more money by following the simple steps in this series on How to Sell UC to Small and Medium-sized Businesses.

When a customer is looking for a new phone system, it’s tempting to view the opportunity as simply supplying an IP-based alternative. Broadly speaking, this is “Dial-tone replacement”. OK, it’s a large market worth, say, about £1bn per year in the UK. However, the issue is that this market is saturated with competitors  offering low prices, leaving you with a simple choice: give a discount or give up. This is the Red Ocean of Unified Communications, coloured by the blood of too many resellers competing for too little business!

What if you could plot a course to a new *Blue Ocean? One that is FIVE TIMES BIGGER with plenty of open water, where there are fewer competitors and where customers will pay a higher price. The good news is that for every £1 spent on “Dial-tone replacement” today about £5 is spent on business improvement solutions. After all, Unified Communications is about convergence and business enablement, not just dial-tone replacement. I’ll show you how to find this ocean by following  some simple steps.

Step one is to “Refocus on the Blue Ocean”. How? It’s easy but it takes conscious effort to get started, so:

a.       Stop being an expert in technologies and start being an expert in how to apply technology to your customer’s business. Make sure you use the same business language as your customer.

b.      Stop talking about VoIP and start talking about your customer’s sales effectiveness, customer loyalty, time to process orders, approve credit ratings or insurance claims.

c.       Work out, ideally with them, how they can do things faster and with fewer people using your solution.

d.      Find out how they measure performance and about inefficiencies in the way their business works.

e.      Set up a meeting with the customer to talk about them, not your product.

This is not about new products and solutions. It is all about how you sell, not what you sell.

If you think this sounds too complicated, keep working on “Dial-tone replacement” opportunities. Go ahead; bore the pants off your customer with your knowledge of SIP trunking or QoS deployment. You’ll know who’s to blame if you don’t make any money. Instead, why not give this a try, even if it’s just with one customer? Get refocused and I’ll guarantee you’ll soon be swimming in that clear blue ocean!

Next time I’ll show you how to get straight to the decision-maker and how to improve your chances of snatching a deal from your toughest competitor. *(Read “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne)

Mike Willshare

Our conclusion to this mini series on Selling in the Recession:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVVlKy1KIPk

For more of this and many other aspects of selling Unified Communications, VoIP and Business Collaboration Tools, click on HOW to SELL Unified Communications TV.

My blog posts to date have been very much concerned with applications as the ‘key to the sale’ for UC. Not only do they address real customer issues, but they add margin, provide differentiation from competitors and deliver rapid RoI. They also give you something to discuss with a customer that’s of real interest to them – their business, how it works and simple steps to improve it.

But… however enthusistic I may be about applications, I do recognise that they may not be the only key to selling UC, so I’m interested in hearing your experiences. What has worked well for you in selling UC solutions – either to SMEs or to larger organisations? What are your keys to success?

Let me know your thoughts by clicking on the Leave a Comment icon above.

Mike Last

Cooke Aquaculture is a family firm that breeds salmon and cod in the USA and Canada. In 2006, the company replaced a Centrex service from its telecom provider with IP phones for its 1,500 employees, with cost savings coming from reducing long-distance bills and internal hosting of voicemail.

However the biggest advantage to the firm is coming from the development of custom phone applications such as those bringing weather and market conditions straight to employee phones. Data on water temperature and wind speeds at fisheries in Newfoundland and New Brunswick used to be sent daily by email. Now the data is collected and relayed every 30 minutes to IP phones used by fishery managers and other executives, enabling them to make commercial decisions much more rapidly than was previously possible. Another application tracks daily salmon market prices and sends updates to salespeople twice a week, again pushing XML data through Cisco CallManager to phones. This allows them to quote customers more accurately.

All this and the company hasn’t yet installed even some fairly basic UC features on its IP phone system – such as voice-conferencing.

Cooke’s next steps are to invest in MeetingPlace Express audioconferencing and then Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. The company currently spends about $30,000 with telecom carriers for voice-conferencing, and adding the IP audioconferencing will reduce this with a smaller software maintenance fee. They plan to rollout more IP phone applications to display Key Performance Indictors, and the  Cisco UPC client will also open up additional collaboration options such as presence and videoconferencing.

But all that’s not going to happen for a year or two. For now, Cooke has bigger fish to fry: consolidating and virtualising its data centers.

Total value of the contract? Your guess is as good as mine… but right now this customer is extremely happy, largely due to the benefits they are seeing from their IP Phone applications.

If it can be done for Fisheries, why not for any industry? Its all about working with your customers to understand their communications needs and opportunities, and helping them understand the best ways in which to address these.

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