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them and provide them value first. (You are currently
reading such a piece of my marketing.)
If a service provider wants to be top of mind with a
partner, the more concrete the service provider is about
whom they provide outcomes for and how, the more
likely the partner will be to think of the service provider
during the sales process.
The opposite is also true. If the target is vague, the
service provider won’t be top of mind. It will be one of
six bids. Good luck with that.
There are a number of ways to differentiate the
service provider. One way is with the service offer-
ing – what it contains, who it is for, what they can
do with it. When there are 300 companies powering
their hosted PBX offerings with BroadSoft, the differ-
entiation will not be in features. It will be in service
delivery, project management, implementation, de-
ployment and professional services.
Much of that ties together since the project – the
delivery of sold services – needs to be managed along-
side the customer expectations. In voice, there are a
number of moving parts – extensions, DIDs, toll-free
numbers, conferencing, voicemail, porting, inter-opera-
bility (of trunks with the customer hardware), handsets,
software, integration, fax, training and features. Some-
one needs to have a handle on the delivery, implemen-
tation, deployment, training, timeline and porting. And
how this is handled needs to be explained to both part-
ners and customers. It can be the difference maker.
What I find ironic is that many service providers
love their tech and think it is the only thing that they
need to gain customers. Yet these same service provid-
ers don’t have a good view of the market. For example,
Frontier has added SMS to landlines to prolong their
revenue from copper. Not many hosted PBX providers
have added SMS features to their VoIP offering, which is
actually easier.
The hosted PBX providers kind of jumped past uni-
fied messaging – the one inbox – and went after the
unified communications label – and failed actually. It
was a garbage can term that customers were not look-
ing for. It had a number of components – video, voice,
email, text/chat, etc. It was clunky. Messaging has to be
concise and clear.
This is why education is such a big part of selling.
The partner needs training, but the prospect needs
education on the features, benefits, outcomes. Case
studies are becoming a marketing thing due to this
need, but it will quickly become just noise. Market-
ers ruin everything.
Last year, a prospect called me about migrating
from hosted PBX back to a premises PBX system.
The requirements included integration with Sage and
Outlook. I didn’t know that one of my service pro-
viders actually integrated with both software apps.
There was nothing on the Web site or in the market-
ing. Missed opportunity.
That was the not only time that has occurred.
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THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK