Travel Freeze? – What a great opportunity for UC!
I was on a call on Friday to one of our favourite customers. We’d planned to run half day workshop in the UK later this month for their European sales team. “Forget it”, I was told, “We’ve just announced a travel freeze!” Well, in these days of cost-cutting, what can you expect? Unfortunately it means this sales team won’t get the knowledge and skills they need right now to launch new products that will help them through this downturn. So now the challenge is to get the information across quickly in other ways. Luckily for us the technology now exists to let us collaborate with customers using web-based tools and telepresence. In fact, it seemed strange our customer didn’t suggest this before, especially as they are part of the ICT industry. I did some quick sums in my head. I reckon it was going to cost over €30,000 to bring the team together for just this one event. So, now, we are looking at different ways we can train these people using Unified Communications technologies. OK, I know you don’t get the same impact via the web, but we’ve got some ideas about how to fix that!
Just think, though, if businesses in our industry aren’t exploring UC themselves, what about all the rest. So for you UC salespeople out there use this as a great opportunity. Get on the phone and find out which of your customers are imposing travel restrictions and start selling them some UC right now!