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

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.

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

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.

Read the full article

For more on using a “Consultative Selling” approach visit:

http://www.skillsconnection.tv/categories/SERIOUS-Selling

It has been extremely interesting to see the variety of opinions - whilst some believe that an IP phone application is as rare in the wild as a Giant Panda, others hold the view that they are extremely useful tools for addressing specific customer challenges, introducing them to the value that can be realised through UC as well as providing differentiation and  increased margins on UC sales.

Selling has been easy in the good times, but its considerably harder now. We all need to hone our sales skills and look at ways to make our offerings more attractive to potential customers than those of our competitors.

A great example of this was offered by Ajoy at www.parsec-tech.com, who was able to meet the need of a Saudi government customer for the call to prayer to be broadcast 5 times a day. They were able to develop an IP Phone application that broadcast both voice and text prayer time alerts on their Cisco IPTs - in Arabic too! A unique application that provided significant differentiation and won the business…

There is, if you approach the opportunity properly. We work with companies that resell UC technology from some of the leading UC vendors  but regularly make margins of 30-40%. Here are some of their secrets (sorry, guys!)

1.       Stop selling just “dial-tone replacement”.

2.       Find the customer’s broken or inefficient business process (easier than it sounds)

3.       Build a solution, not a kit list.

4.       Include:

·         Network health check

·         Application development

·         System design

·         Project Management (even on a $50k deal)

·         Add some user training

5.       Write a simple project plan

Then do some real selling. Focus on the customer challenge and sell the solution, not the kit. Try it, it works a treat. If you don’t know how, sign up for our free sales training at the top of this blog.

Mike Willshare

But beware; Siemens don’t always go the slow migration route. Check with your customer what migration path Siemens are proposing. If it looks like they are proposing a full IP rollout the following suggestions will be pointless, but if it looks like they are try to protect their income by proposing IP-enablement of existing kit then:

1.       Make sure your solution takes the customer to full VoIP as quickly as possible.

2.       Explain that IP-enablement is investment in obsolete technology (like buying a VCR using VHS or Betamax!).  

3.       Emphasise that true Return on Investment in UC is only realised with the move to full IP.

Good luck defeating Siemens!

Mike Willshare

Value. It’s all about value. Value is recession proof.

So watch this video on “Selling the Value” and learn why this more important the ever.

For more on Value Based Selling, check out our “SERIOUS Selling” at:

http://www.skillsconnection.tv/categories/SERIOUS-Selling