Microsoft Phone Systems may seem like a huge, intimidating competitor, but it’s actually not that difficult to win sales against them. Bicom Systems has determined that they have three major weaknesses that we can easily compete with.
1. Microsoft phone systems are based on IT-applications, not just voice communications. They are not specialized in voice and don’t understand all that goes with it. For them, it’s just one application among many. Your company can compete with this by showing the customer that you’re specialized in voice communications – the most important component. Bicom Systems‘ PBXware has excellent speech quality and high reliability, as seen in our projects involving Lync where the VAR had to drop using Lync.
2. Microsoft is more expensive in the long-run. Ask your customer to think about the next 3-5 years and prepare a cost comparison for them to look at. With Microsoft, software needs constant upgrading which is much more costly than the simple hardware upgrades or add-ons they’ll have with a voice-centric business. With Bicom Systems customers can simply add-on to PBXware as they wish without spending on constant upgrades and ‘newer’ software.
3. Stability. The simple fact is that every major vendor chooses the Open Source base of Linux upon which to build their phone systems. Do you want to be rebooting your phones as often as you do your Microsoft PC?
4. Finally, everyone has some sort of pre-formed opinion about Microsoft. Take advantage of this. If your customer has had bad experiences with Microsoft, it will be easy to win the sale against them! Start by asking your customer about their experience and take the opportunity to respond to any issues they’ve had. For example, if one of our potential customers has had breeches of security with Microsoft, Bicom Systems tells them about our built-in security features.
Don’t let Microsoft’s big name intimidate you. They may be a huge player in the industry, but they’re not specialized in voice communications and can’t compete with the higher performance and lower price of specialized companies.
This post is part of a series: Read the others be clicking below:
How to Compete with Alcatel Lucent
How to Compete with Shoretel