Broadview Networks started in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Telecom Act of 1996, which launched a trillion dollar raid on the profits of the Baby Bells. Brian Crotty, Broadview's COO, presented a webinar about their OfficeSuite UC product and agent portal. Here are 4 points made.
You can't sell UC with 3 or more quotes. There has to be a Discovery phase; then a phase where you, the partner, have to match up pain points against vendors to present the best fit. Do a demo (aimed at the prospect's pain points) and closing goes up to 70%. Also, if you get the vendor channel manager, SE or other rep involved in the sale, closing goes up to almost 80%.
Point 1: Leverage your channel team in discovery, demo and defining desired outcomes.
Labor is a company's greatest expense. UCaaS is about allowing that company to be flexible, nimble, mobile and virtual. It is about making technology effective for the business. It is about enhancing the BYOD (bring your own device) trend that has been going on for five years.
Point 2: Go beyond dial-tone and features to talk about workflow and mobility - and about the managed service and ease of use. (To do that you either have to eat that dog food - or leverage the provider's channel team.)
UCaaS can be sticky IF the users use it! Without adoption, the investment is useless - and they might as well have picked the commodity VoIP service. Adoption is the tough part. Not sure which provider has that figured out yet. Although RC does monitor your portal login during the first month to see if you are using it. (If not, they email and call you.)
Crotty mentioned that industry churn for network sales is between 1.7% to 2.5%. But when a company adopts UCaaS, churn drops below 1%.
Point 3: UCaaS is selling Change. If they are unwilling or unable to take advantage of a new way of communicating and collaborating, perhaps they are better served with a SIP trunk.
Broadview stated that OfficeSuite provided disaster avoidance as a true cloud service, implying that it was better than other cloud UCaaS and better than Disaster Recovery. All about the words.
Point 4: Discuss Uptime, reliability, security to comfort the prospect's lizard brain.
Broadview own the code that OfficeSuite was built on. It doesn't use SIP (they use SilNet). It is an encrypted call signal. The handsets are dummies; all intelligence sits in the cloud. They can re-use Polycom and Mitel handsets but it will be stripped down. They have a portal - Control all of your comms in a single pane of glass .
