From Tula with his PBX. We are trying to enter the European markets
In a dream, almost every IT entrepreneur, if he dreams of success, if he is active, is young and cheerful, very often sees a picture like this: early morning, spring San Francisco, an entrepreneur driving a lemon yellow Tesla X rushing to a meeting with investors discuss a new round of investment, followed by an IPO. After that, all the shareholders of the company, including the minority ones, amicably go to the round-the-world tour on yachts of 200 million each.
About a year ago, similar visions began to be visited by our head of the sales department - he slept and saw how the Russian IT project, with a confident step of the Macedonian phalanx, was taking by storm European and Asian capitals. It should be noted that the seller’s dreams did not seem quite unrealizable - we have our own cloud platform, which has been under development for several years now, and its name is ITooLabs Communications Server.
Our development office, the holy of holies and the Temple of Science with an altar to the glory of cloud technologies, has historically formed in the city of Tula, and this is rather good than bad - a quiet, cozy town in the center of Russia disposes to a thoughtful understanding of global IT strategies, while fraternity - Moscow - just a couple of hours on the car. To say that we are not arbitrary life - it means to lecture. The ITooLabs cloud-based carrier platform is well-known in the carrier environment, there are regular and loyal customers, a number of interesting developments, its own communicator, and trusting relationships with major players and colleagues in the IT market. It would seem - live and rejoice and we live and rejoice. Joy overshadows only the periodic (rather than constant) availability of San Francisco spring and the insufficient number of Tesla X lemon in the office parking.
')
About time and about yourself
The Russian market is huge, dynamic and moderately positive, all calculations of work-marketers instill confidence in the cloudless future of the cloud virtual PBX. Virtualization and SaaS are striding by leaps and bounds around the country, leaving traces even on the dusty paths of small cities. But our business model is not designed for end users, we work with telecom operators and offer them, without investing in infrastructure and development, to host a cloud-based virtual PBX service in a few days. All software lives in our cluster, from the partner-operator, in fact, in addition to the desire to increase ARPU due to new services, it takes only a few hours of thoughtful work of engineers and about a dozen graphic files to customize the PBX.
Like this:
From here follows one limitation - we ourselves can reach the end user only with the hands of his operator, and therefore have a direct impact on sales of partners can only through the endless development of services, joint marketing movements and motivating conversations with direct sellers. With such a sales model, constant expansion and the search for new partners looks like a very reasonable and justifiable strategy: we try to maximize our presence in the markets, attracting more and more operators and form some Darwinian model of behavior - the coolest survives. Moreover, we love each other with operators according to the “rhubarb-sharing” model, i.e. we do not take any obligatory payments, but honestly divide the revenue received only from live sales.
Several of our partners, at first actively taking up the promotion of cloud PBX, were gradually blown away and this happened for reasons beyond ITooLabs. So you can not stop, so go ahead and look for new and new partners, and we are looking for them everywhere, all over the world: in Europe, Polynesia and in the Antarctic territories of Australia. You come to us, to Tula, with samovars, we are to you, to Europe, with your IP-PBX.
A screenshot of the dream of our main realist marketer looks like this:
Marketers are usually creative people and prone to fantasy, but we got another - a realist, with a moderate share of objectivism.
At the same time, our main businessman Ruslan was read as a child by Jules Verne and Mayne Reid, and he dreams of completely different dreams. Screenshot of Ruslan's dream:
Shareholders like Ruslan’s dream more: we print a screenshot and hang it on the wall of the office, instead of the classic map of the CIS, like ToDo for the coming year.
We look at the map and draw a sequence of actions for entering the world markets.
What should be done:
- analyze the state of affairs with SaaS in Europe, Polynesia and the Americas
- identify the right business model for entering local markets
- we customize the sales platform in the non-Russian-speaking segment (we translate the interface into English)
- we open additional sales offices in Europe
- we form an agent network
- we sell a platform in Europe, the Americas and in the Antarctic territories of Australia
- subscribe to the newsletter on the Tesla website, so as not to miss the announcement of a new modification
What is done now:
- analytics were collected for several months. Collected: all is not so bad. The European market is specific and competitive, but there are points of growth. Confirmed by the recommendations of the best marketers.
- The business model is formed and documented. Partnerships and direct sales of a correct, commercial, solution to unhurried European operators, with homemade crooked asterisk platforms, are not seen as an impossible task (it turns out Asterisks are also sawing in Bosnia-Bosnia).
- Interest in English translated in a couple of weeks. This is perhaps the simplest thing to do.
- opened two European offices. One in London (there everything is easy and simple with the IT business, plus the company's reputation with an office in Europe itself). The second is in Skopje, in Macedonia. The country liked the geography (an hour by plane to Hanover or Istanbul) and loyal tax policies for foreign companies.
- found the first partner in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans. Started a little active. At the time of this writing, the partner will just launch us at a significant Eastern European event. We observe and wait for the results.
- Tesla did not subscribe to the newsletter yet. Superstitious.
The really active movements began in the spring of 2015, when we decided to take part in the widely publicized IT party TelcoDays, in Prague. We honestly defended for three days and returned to Russia with conflicting feelings. Ruslan's dreams have become even more colorful and dynamic, but the shareholders have worsened the dream - in order to work properly in Europe, a resource is needed: people, money, brainstorming. We will look for ways to cope with all this. Aytulabs has already had experience in custom development for foreign clients, several successful projects have been implemented for various XXXX telecoms. Well, now we will build and sales schemes, xneophobic-amateurish syndrome, thank God, is absent. We promise to share almost all the insiders and results in our blog, there is nothing to hide, and experience will certainly be useful to many.
On the platform with bells
To tell about ambitions and achievements and not to tell about the product itself would be, at least, wrong. We tell and show with screenshots and funny people with what product at the ready we are going to storm the NASDAQ.
ITooLabs is a white-label carrier platform with a fully graphical admin interface, everything is already deployed and configured in our data center, the partner-operator gets a partner account and customization in a matter of days. Designer Yuri will do all the work himself, all that is needed from the operator is a brand book and answers to questions posed by email.
The interface of the client service (the same client who will call and manage his PBX) looks like this:
The interface of the partner operator looks a little more boring, but also more functional. Without this, nowhere: the client should be comfortable to use, the main part of the settings is made by the service provider and its engineers. To do this, more buttons and settings to help them.
The platform's engineer-curator, who is also an advanced admin on the operator’s side, gets a new client:
Then it connects additional services to it, if the client wishes to use them. There are many services and not all are needed. However, no one bothers to sell them for extra money. We give access to all the "stuffing", acquired by overworking developers:
The client was brought in, the client receives his personal entry point into the cluster and is fully confident that he is so alone that the callous hands of admins are specially for him, got a special subdomain, logins and passwords. In fact, subdomains are generated by a simple mouse click in the admin panel.
The administrator (manager-telephonist) of the client will log in with his account and see the settings panel:
What is seen in the top screenshot is the third and a half version of the platform design. We didn’t come to this design right away, starting development with an interface with a lot of buttons and options, in full confidence that delighted customers will appreciate the flexibility and 30 thousand possibilities. In fact, it turned out that no one is very interested in round-the-clock configuration of multi-level IVR and redirects, everyone wants to start calling within the first five minutes.
Well, no problem. Get it and sign it. IVR are configured with a mouse for a couple of clicks:
Studying the market and the wishes of customers, we came to an unequivocal conclusion: the first thing any manager needs is statistics and control over employee calls. The telephone platform should not only provide convenience and functionality, it should also help save on communication. Great, we are doing advanced and beautiful statistics for bosses and managers. Monitor and analyze on health. Our chief development officer, Cyril, has been hanging for days in the statistics panel, catching trends and patterns.
For the ever-busy executives, visuals have developed a visual-graphical interface with columns, diagrams, diagrams. Feel like an analyst and build call schedules and costs at least every half hour.
Zvonilno-client part. IP phones are a great and convenient thing, but they cost money and sometimes a lot. By the way, one of the most frequently asked questions when moving to IP telephony: “How much does the equipment cost? Phones are expensive? Honest answer - "Yes, I have to buy, the equipment will be required, it is not cheap." However, not everything is as bad as it seems at first glance, there are also software solutions: softphones. Some of them are completely free, for some ask for money. We do not ask and have developed our own softphone , which is also a communicator with a call control panel. What a wedding without a accordion, what a SaaS without a "call", download the softphone and call.
For lovers of beauty and unique design, we offer “paint the fridge yellow” and turn the softphone into a customized solution with the logos and colors of the operator. Designer Yuri is ready to draw a dialer even in the colors of the Brazilian national football team. We need only competent TK.
There are some intermediate results (we will not be limited to just one post on this blog and want to share information further): we like the platform ourselves, our clients in Russia like it and even like it, forever sitting in smartphones, Czechs and Germans. The first moves to enter the European markets have already been made, I would not want to stop, I called myself a European - immerse yourself in marketing. We will dive, or rather, we will already dive, about which we will try to report regularly.
We will be happy to answer all questions and share the accumulated and already accumulated experience. Soon back with the news.
About a year ago, similar visions began to be visited by our head of the sales department - he slept and saw how the Russian IT project, with a confident step of the Macedonian phalanx, was taking by storm European and Asian capitals. It should be noted that the seller’s dreams did not seem quite unrealizable - we have our own cloud platform, which has been under development for several years now, and its name is ITooLabs Communications Server.
Our development office, the holy of holies and the Temple of Science with an altar to the glory of cloud technologies, has historically formed in the city of Tula, and this is rather good than bad - a quiet, cozy town in the center of Russia disposes to a thoughtful understanding of global IT strategies, while fraternity - Moscow - just a couple of hours on the car. To say that we are not arbitrary life - it means to lecture. The ITooLabs cloud-based carrier platform is well-known in the carrier environment, there are regular and loyal customers, a number of interesting developments, its own communicator, and trusting relationships with major players and colleagues in the IT market. It would seem - live and rejoice and we live and rejoice. Joy overshadows only the periodic (rather than constant) availability of San Francisco spring and the insufficient number of Tesla X lemon in the office parking.
')
About time and about yourself
The Russian market is huge, dynamic and moderately positive, all calculations of work-marketers instill confidence in the cloudless future of the cloud virtual PBX. Virtualization and SaaS are striding by leaps and bounds around the country, leaving traces even on the dusty paths of small cities. But our business model is not designed for end users, we work with telecom operators and offer them, without investing in infrastructure and development, to host a cloud-based virtual PBX service in a few days. All software lives in our cluster, from the partner-operator, in fact, in addition to the desire to increase ARPU due to new services, it takes only a few hours of thoughtful work of engineers and about a dozen graphic files to customize the PBX.
Like this:
From here follows one limitation - we ourselves can reach the end user only with the hands of his operator, and therefore have a direct impact on sales of partners can only through the endless development of services, joint marketing movements and motivating conversations with direct sellers. With such a sales model, constant expansion and the search for new partners looks like a very reasonable and justifiable strategy: we try to maximize our presence in the markets, attracting more and more operators and form some Darwinian model of behavior - the coolest survives. Moreover, we love each other with operators according to the “rhubarb-sharing” model, i.e. we do not take any obligatory payments, but honestly divide the revenue received only from live sales.
Several of our partners, at first actively taking up the promotion of cloud PBX, were gradually blown away and this happened for reasons beyond ITooLabs. So you can not stop, so go ahead and look for new and new partners, and we are looking for them everywhere, all over the world: in Europe, Polynesia and in the Antarctic territories of Australia. You come to us, to Tula, with samovars, we are to you, to Europe, with your IP-PBX.
A screenshot of the dream of our main realist marketer looks like this:
Marketers are usually creative people and prone to fantasy, but we got another - a realist, with a moderate share of objectivism.
At the same time, our main businessman Ruslan was read as a child by Jules Verne and Mayne Reid, and he dreams of completely different dreams. Screenshot of Ruslan's dream:
Shareholders like Ruslan’s dream more: we print a screenshot and hang it on the wall of the office, instead of the classic map of the CIS, like ToDo for the coming year.
We look at the map and draw a sequence of actions for entering the world markets.
What should be done:
- analyze the state of affairs with SaaS in Europe, Polynesia and the Americas
- identify the right business model for entering local markets
- we customize the sales platform in the non-Russian-speaking segment (we translate the interface into English)
- we open additional sales offices in Europe
- we form an agent network
- we sell a platform in Europe, the Americas and in the Antarctic territories of Australia
- subscribe to the newsletter on the Tesla website, so as not to miss the announcement of a new modification
What is done now:
- analytics were collected for several months. Collected: all is not so bad. The European market is specific and competitive, but there are points of growth. Confirmed by the recommendations of the best marketers.
- The business model is formed and documented. Partnerships and direct sales of a correct, commercial, solution to unhurried European operators, with homemade crooked asterisk platforms, are not seen as an impossible task (it turns out Asterisks are also sawing in Bosnia-Bosnia).
- Interest in English translated in a couple of weeks. This is perhaps the simplest thing to do.
- opened two European offices. One in London (there everything is easy and simple with the IT business, plus the company's reputation with an office in Europe itself). The second is in Skopje, in Macedonia. The country liked the geography (an hour by plane to Hanover or Istanbul) and loyal tax policies for foreign companies.
- found the first partner in Eastern Europe, in the Balkans. Started a little active. At the time of this writing, the partner will just launch us at a significant Eastern European event. We observe and wait for the results.
- Tesla did not subscribe to the newsletter yet. Superstitious.
The really active movements began in the spring of 2015, when we decided to take part in the widely publicized IT party TelcoDays, in Prague. We honestly defended for three days and returned to Russia with conflicting feelings. Ruslan's dreams have become even more colorful and dynamic, but the shareholders have worsened the dream - in order to work properly in Europe, a resource is needed: people, money, brainstorming. We will look for ways to cope with all this. Aytulabs has already had experience in custom development for foreign clients, several successful projects have been implemented for various XXXX telecoms. Well, now we will build and sales schemes, xneophobic-amateurish syndrome, thank God, is absent. We promise to share almost all the insiders and results in our blog, there is nothing to hide, and experience will certainly be useful to many.
On the platform with bells
To tell about ambitions and achievements and not to tell about the product itself would be, at least, wrong. We tell and show with screenshots and funny people with what product at the ready we are going to storm the NASDAQ.
ITooLabs is a white-label carrier platform with a fully graphical admin interface, everything is already deployed and configured in our data center, the partner-operator gets a partner account and customization in a matter of days. Designer Yuri will do all the work himself, all that is needed from the operator is a brand book and answers to questions posed by email.
The interface of the client service (the same client who will call and manage his PBX) looks like this:
The interface of the partner operator looks a little more boring, but also more functional. Without this, nowhere: the client should be comfortable to use, the main part of the settings is made by the service provider and its engineers. To do this, more buttons and settings to help them.
The platform's engineer-curator, who is also an advanced admin on the operator’s side, gets a new client:
Then it connects additional services to it, if the client wishes to use them. There are many services and not all are needed. However, no one bothers to sell them for extra money. We give access to all the "stuffing", acquired by overworking developers:
The client was brought in, the client receives his personal entry point into the cluster and is fully confident that he is so alone that the callous hands of admins are specially for him, got a special subdomain, logins and passwords. In fact, subdomains are generated by a simple mouse click in the admin panel.
The administrator (manager-telephonist) of the client will log in with his account and see the settings panel:
What is seen in the top screenshot is the third and a half version of the platform design. We didn’t come to this design right away, starting development with an interface with a lot of buttons and options, in full confidence that delighted customers will appreciate the flexibility and 30 thousand possibilities. In fact, it turned out that no one is very interested in round-the-clock configuration of multi-level IVR and redirects, everyone wants to start calling within the first five minutes.
Well, no problem. Get it and sign it. IVR are configured with a mouse for a couple of clicks:
Studying the market and the wishes of customers, we came to an unequivocal conclusion: the first thing any manager needs is statistics and control over employee calls. The telephone platform should not only provide convenience and functionality, it should also help save on communication. Great, we are doing advanced and beautiful statistics for bosses and managers. Monitor and analyze on health. Our chief development officer, Cyril, has been hanging for days in the statistics panel, catching trends and patterns.
For the ever-busy executives, visuals have developed a visual-graphical interface with columns, diagrams, diagrams. Feel like an analyst and build call schedules and costs at least every half hour.
Zvonilno-client part. IP phones are a great and convenient thing, but they cost money and sometimes a lot. By the way, one of the most frequently asked questions when moving to IP telephony: “How much does the equipment cost? Phones are expensive? Honest answer - "Yes, I have to buy, the equipment will be required, it is not cheap." However, not everything is as bad as it seems at first glance, there are also software solutions: softphones. Some of them are completely free, for some ask for money. We do not ask and have developed our own softphone , which is also a communicator with a call control panel. What a wedding without a accordion, what a SaaS without a "call", download the softphone and call.
For lovers of beauty and unique design, we offer “paint the fridge yellow” and turn the softphone into a customized solution with the logos and colors of the operator. Designer Yuri is ready to draw a dialer even in the colors of the Brazilian national football team. We need only competent TK.
There are some intermediate results (we will not be limited to just one post on this blog and want to share information further): we like the platform ourselves, our clients in Russia like it and even like it, forever sitting in smartphones, Czechs and Germans. The first moves to enter the European markets have already been made, I would not want to stop, I called myself a European - immerse yourself in marketing. We will dive, or rather, we will already dive, about which we will try to report regularly.
We will be happy to answer all questions and share the accumulated and already accumulated experience. Soon back with the news.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/295504/
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