The Business Case for UCaaS
How To Convince Your Customers To Buy-In
B2B technology buying is changing. Buyers (your customers) are more informed than ever before, and often they have made most of their buying decisions before they ever talk to sales reps about their technology requirements. According to Forrester the dynamics of B2B technology sales roles are changing.
Not just selling…It’s advising
Your customers’ technology requirements change rapidly, especially during a pandemic, and they need expert insights and decision advice to determine which technology and communication solution delivers on their needs and plays well with their existing technology investments.
Peter Eldon, Director of Sales and Marketing at Access4 explains that simply taking orders on products doesn’t meet customer expectations anymore.
“In the wake of the pandemic and rapidly moving remote working, end-users are less concerned about the flashy bells and whistles of one platform against another. Salespeople in MSP’s now need to be communicating the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of technology investments and leading the conversation on how the technology can address business, growth or operational challenges.”
So, how do Australia and New Zealand’s MSP community turn into a trusted advisor when it comes to selling UCaaS solutions?
Educate your customers on UCaaS – not just a product:
With a vast number of MSP and CSP organisations having rarely sold UCaaS or Voice solutions, the most efficient way to sales success is to educate customers on the market, not just the product.
“UCaaS is a notoriously misunderstood technology that gets lost in a series of acronyms. Many vendors talk to their customers assuming that the customer knows everything about telephony, networks and cloud communications. What we have found is that often end-users have no idea what a ‘UCaaS’ is, it’s value proposition or how to tie it back as a solution to a very real business problem they have.” says Peter Eldon.
Educating customers can often be achieved with a solution selling approach where MSPs proactively ask customers what are some of the troubles they are experiencing with their current set-up. Are they managing dual phone systems? Do they have long call-wait times? Are they unable to take calls via their Microsoft Teams accounts? How long is provisioning?
All of these questions open up the discussion to educate customers on where a UCaaS solution can fit in.
Explain how UCaaS can address these challenges
Traditionally, the relationship between MSP/CSP used to be transactional and based on procurement, price, features and troubleshooting. Today end-user customers want to discuss specific outcomes, their problems and be guided in their technology purchase decisions.
The MSP and CSP community now need to shift from discussing the particular product or price savings, to how the product can fit into the wider technology architecture of the customer, and service business continuity and innovation.
“It’s a different conversation with customers where the MSP is now in the ‘trusted advisor’ seat which leads to a deeper understanding of the customer needs. This ultimately benefits the MSP as they form longer customer relationships and more profitability.” comments Eldon.
“We’ve found coming to the conversation with data, statistics and relevant industry information helps with this sales conversation. Every customer of an MSP wants to know how they can improve their organisation – even by providing information on how long it takes them to answer calls, how many calls they get per day, how much they’re spending on extra data storage or porting fees starts to build a compelling playbook on why they need to uptake a UCaaS Solution.”
“Going into a UCaaS sales conversation with a customer and expect that they have no idea on the metrics of their communication activity, and then providing those metrics and information, will position the MSP as the subject matter expert and the go-to advisor on any future solution investments.” Eldon comments.
Drop the ‘security’ bomb…
Australian and New Zealand organisations today are hyper-aware about their need for cybersecurity resilience, however, a vast majority of them are under protected. To start (or expand on) the security conversation, MSPs and CSPs are in a strong position to relay the advantages of UCaaS to mitigate security vulnerabilities.
UCaaS solutions, such as Access 4’s SASBOSS™, have inbuilt security features that protect customers from their DIY set-ups or legacy voice technology. Some of these features include:
➔ Safe and secure VOIP calls – including TLS encryption at end-points
➔ User access permissions and controls – no unnecessary access to features that could share or leak important data
➔ Monitoring of fraudulent activity through platform logging – versus low-visibility in standard VOIP or telephony systems
➔ Avoiding data leakage across multi-tenancy and the use of hypervisor to separate and divide cloud tenants in the same data storage facility
➔ Compliance with NDB and GDPR – UCaaS solutions often give visibility and data on files that are transferred through voice systems, allowing compliance to be achieved.
MSPs in the Australian and New Zealand community need to build strong business relationships and business cases for customers, approaching their sales with a solution-oriented focus. Helping customers understand UCaaS while directly linking back to relevant business pain points, and covering security concerns will ensure a strong relationship well beyond deployment.
We’re so confident that our MSP partners can achieve great financial and customer results, that we’re willing to bank $50,000 ARR in credits for our partners with our latest Partner Promise offer.
Peter Eldon
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Jan 14, 2022
