Category Archives: Unified Communications

Benefits of Selling SaaS

Posted on by

selling-saas

According to Forbes, the Cloud Computing Market is expected to reach $411B by 2020 and the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 16%, growing from $58.6B in 2017 to $99.7B by 2020 (source).

Service Providers abound in today’s marketplace, however it is yet to be seen how many will successfully capture this opportunity and expand their existing offerings to meet the demand for Cloud and SaaS Add-Ons.

SaaS – Software as a Service – is just a fancy name for all of those cloud and software-based add-ons that increase the value of your existing solutions. For example, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) or Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

Have your customers and prospects started requesting these new services yet? Have you had to turn down any feature requests? Turn away any prospects looking for a one-stop-shop?

As evidenced by the financial data, contemporary technologies like UCaaS and CCaaS are quickly becoming expectations rather than extras. If you do not yet provide them, you are missing opportunities to grow your business and secure your future.

Adding these new technologies to your existing offering will enable you to:

1. Reach more customers

SaaS add-ons are in high demand. Offering those services allows you to say “yes” to whatever your next prospect may request. The more services you offer, the more customers you will reach.

Not only will you win more customers in your existing niche, these additional solutions will allow you to enter new markets. For example, the Contact Center as a Service sphere is growing rapidly and offers a whole new group of prospective customers.

2. Generate more profit

Any kind of addition to your existing product line opens up the opportunity for more return on each sale. You are making your products more valuable. Best of all, customers are willing to pay for it. These softwares are powerful tools that will improve business and are worth the price.

Expanding your product line is an important step to building your brand. As your customer base grows, your brand will grow too.

3. Future-proof your business

Adopting SaaS will prepare your business for the future in a few ways. First of all, the monthly subscription models fosters a long-term commitment that reduces customer churn. Becoming a one-stop-shop discourages customers from leaving for greener pastures.

Second, in our innovation-obsessed industry, it is important to keep pace with the technological trends and evolve to meet demand very quickly. Adopting the cloud and SaaS is a step in the right direction. Partnering with a vendor of contemporary technologies ensures that you have someone in your camp looking out for the next trends.

This all sounds great, so… Where to start?

We would love to chat with you about your business and how to seize this opportunity. Meet Bicom Systems this fall at WISPAPALOOZA or AstriCon to learn all about the latest technologies and how to add them to your business offering.

WISPAPALOOZA
October 8-12
Las Vegas, NV
Booth #117
Learn more

ASTRICON
October 9-11
Orlando, FL
Learn more

Our first Bicom Systems User Group Meeting will be on Monday October 8th at WISPAPALOOZA in Las Vegas. It is a free event and open to ALL WISPS (you do not have to be or become a customer to attend). Join us from 9:00 to 4:00 for a behind-the-scenes look at VoIP, UCaaS, and CCaaS with networking and presentations from:

– VoIP Marketing Guru Suzanne Urash of CR8 Group who will share her secrets to getting your phones ringing off the hook

– ThinQ, the best kept secret in the carrier space, who will explain how their toolset has greatly increased their partners’ Quality of Service for customers

– Kris Twomey, from the Law Office of Krisopher Twomey and Carol Lisowski, who will speak on telecom compliance and the most recent regulatory issues.

Lunch will be served at noon. Space will fill up quickly, register now at bicomsystems.eventbrite.com.

See you this fall!

Over-the-Top Services

Posted on by

OTT Services

Telcos have had to adapt to change arguably more than any other industry. With the advances that have been made in everyday technology use, it’s becoming harder and harder for telcos to compete with other service providers. The growth of OTT services is clearly taking a toll on telcos due to changing customer preferences.

Over-The-Top (OTT) services are services that are used on top of the basic network services you get from your provider. These services have become much more common thanks to the smartphone. Having a device with such capabilities at our reach at all times has increased communications drastically. VoIP now allows us to make cheap and even free calls and SMS’. However, recently, data has been added to the mix. This poses a threat to telcos which they have not been trying to find a solution to. Telco subscriptions do mean that your are continuously paying for these services, however, you are also not fully reaping the benefits. The danger in this case is the loss of revenue stream from telcos, which in turn makes it harder for them to compete and provide reliable service all the time.

OTT players are thus able to offer better services than telcos nowadays. These providers have continuously adjusted to changing consumer behaviours to guarantee the best service. OTT services have had a huge impact on revenues for telecom operators and that is understood by stakeholders worldwide. With the growth of OTT VoIP, the overall global telco voice revenues will drop drastically from $970.4B to $799.6B by 2020. This is mainly due to the annual growth rate of 20% of the OTT VoIP market.

In a fast-growing environment such as the one OTT providers operate in, it’s important to listen to customers’ needs and aim to satisfy them. Trends have lately been the increased need of personalization and customization. OTT providers have unique and one-of-a-kind solutions to all your needs and will provide you with the solution that best suits you. This is then more convenient for customers, which is why they are willing to pay a premium. The next trend is advancements in technology. With great advancements from GSM to LTE, OTT providers can exploit this by undercutting and providing better rates to their customers, while not compromising quality. Lastly, messaging preferences have probably permanently shifted from traditional SMS to OTT messaging services. This is primarily driven by cost and the increased usage of the smartphone.

As for Voice OTT services, they are arguably the easiest to add. The main argument for this is that they rely on IP networks and the internet to carry the calls; meaning no need to set up complicated and bulky hardware. You are also able to construct the solution you want yourself which makes it extremely user friendly.

OTT providers have come to stay, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. Now is the best time to be competing in one of the fastest growing industries.

4 Benefits of Webinars

Posted on by

4-benefits-of-webinars Webinars are a great interaction tool for any business. It is an efficient and sure way of getting your message out to customers directly, especially in the tech industry. Below are four (4) benefits of presenting webinars. 

Around the clock availability

Webinars are available live and can be visited later on if you are unavailable. This around the clock availability is extremely useful if you have clients that are constantly busy or do business internationally on different time zones than you. Also, having the availability of the webinar after it has gone live helps increase your reach through search engine optimization (SEO) when being searched for at a later date. This helps you stay relevant rather than hosting live seminars and losing the attention once it’s over.  

Easy way of delivering your message to your target

More often than not, those that watch your webinar have an interest or stake in what you are presenting. This means that your audience for the webinar is most likely who you are targeting or should try to target with your marketing efforts. Having your target market come to you rather than putting in extensive, and expensive, market research will simplify your job greatly.

Cost savings

Although you have to spend to create a webinar, you also save considerably from other sources. These include travel costs that your company would have endured in order to educate your customers on changes to the system; the cost of time that’s spent by your presenter while they could be working away at other tasks; and lastly the costs you would’ve undertook to hire a venue and all that comes with hosting a live event. You always want your customer to be educated, however, budgeting properly is should also be a top priority.

Easy way of generating qualified leads

If you ask any sales representative, they will say that generating leads is easy; however, generating QUALIFIED leads is a more difficult process. Relating back to the second benefit, those that are watching your webinar are probably interested in what you are presenting. You are now able to use the registration from the webinar to collect lead information such as contact methods and locations. This is also considered a form of market research as you can see what your demographics and geographics are. Lastly, by educating those watching your webinar you have already qualified them as leads since they are now aware of your products and services and there will be no need to re-qualify.

The 4 benefits mentioned above explain how webinars are a powerful tool if you are looking to increase brand awareness, minimize costs, and boost revenues in the simplest possible way.

How To Sell VoIP: A $140B Industry

Posted on by

How To Sell VoIP

“The VoIP market is expected to grow over 9% in the next 3 years,” and any telco service provider wants to be a part of that growth. In order to be a part of the $140B industry, it is imperative to know the right tactics that will make your product or service sell. Despite all of this promising news, many still don’t know that they need VoIP or are hesitant to switch.

The guide below will make your dive into VoIP a lot easier and enhance your experience with something that might seem very intimidating. It includes 5 key steps on how to: build your VoIP service, market your VoIP service, overcome VoIP selling challenges.

Download your copy here to cement your part in a $140 billion industry

Register for the webinar

How To Sell VoIP

How to Sell… UCaaS

Posted on by

ucaasIn our previous blog series on 3 Steps to Telecom Success, we discussed a number of things that you can do to realize sustainable growth, increase your profit, and increase customer loyalty. One of the overriding themes was adding more cards to your deck – bundling more services into your existing offering.

Perhaps you have made the decision to add Unified Communications, mobility, or something else to your solution, but what’s next? How do we sell this new service?

Our next series is on “How to Sell…” We will cover UCaaS, Mobility, and Integration to start. If you want to learn about how to sell other services, please give us your suggestions in the comments below.

In the meantime, we’ll start with how to sell Unified Communications as a Service.

What is the main reason your customers do not purchase UCaaS? According to the research, it’s probably a lack of information about how UC will benefit their company and how to make the transition.

An Osterman Research study found that 48% of businesses do not understand how UC will benefit their business. They may understand and even want Unified Communications, but are unable to make the leap to the direct benefit to their business. Research also shows that “39% of businesses are intimidated by the migration process.” They may need a little hand-holding to get started. (Source: www.eweek.com).

In the face of these facts, your best tool will be education. If you want to sell UCaaS, you have to teach your customers about UC, thus assuaging their uncertainties and fears.

Benefits

Start by showing what UCaaS can do for your customer – what value will it bring to their business. Be careful not to confuse benefits with features. Features like presence and click-to-call and instant messaging are important and you will want to show those too, but not quite yet. Benefits are big picture values like:

  • Saves time so you can focus on selling
  • Eases stress in the office
  • Supports productivity in workers
  • Enables you to provide better customer service

These are all about how UC will improve the day-to-day lives of your customers. Put yourself in their shoes and consider what issues they face, where are they wasting time everyday, what frustrations do they express. They will identify with these benefits and instantly want to know how to attain them.

Features

Which brings us to features. You have explained what they will get from Unified Communications, now show them how they will get it. Go back through your list of benefits and add at least one feature that supports each. Those are the features that you will show your customers. Some examples are:

  • Click-to-call
  • Drag-and-drop conferences
  • Presence
  • Call transfers
  • Screen-share
  • Voicemail to email
  • Fax to email
  • Multichannel communication
  • Video calling

The list goes on and on. You will know best what types of benefits and features your customers would value.

Transition

Finally, show a clear transition roadmap to your customers from the very start. You now know that they may have fears when it comes to migrating, so bolster their confidence right from the beginning. Take care of as much of the transition from your end as you can so that they have less to worry about. If you are confident, they will become confident as well.

With all three of these areas, demos will be your best friend. Rather than trying to explain the benefits and describe the features over the phone, get them on a free demo and illustrate it. Once they get started, they won’t want to stop.

As you go through the demo, use clear, specific examples to make your points – things that they will immediately identify with and latch on to. For example, you could say “Have you ever been on the phone with a colleague and needed the quick input of someone else? How did you handle it? Did you have to hang up and then come back to the call later? Shoot an email and wait for the response? What if it was as easy as grabbing that third person with your mouse and dragging them in to the call?” as you are doing just that in a demo. If they have ever faced that problem, they will be sold.

One more selling technique to consider: UC makes it so even the smallest businesses can act like enterprises. This is a huge selling point if they fully grasp it. Show your smaller customers that they will have the same capabilities and tools as large enterprises, leveling the playing field for the first time.

If you are interested in learning more about UC and/or selling, we have a few more blog posts that may be of interest to you.

As always, feel free to reach out to us if you want to chat with an experienced account manager.

Stay tuned for next week: How to Sell… Mobility

More posts like this one: