BigData or I know what you did last summer. Learning to sell cloud PBX
Every year, the sale of cloud services and services is becoming more and more time consuming. The market of telephone SaaS is gradually segmented, and this is a sure sign of the maturity of this very market. Bright and at the same time difficult times are coming up for service providers: a clear and understandable demand for cloud solutions has been formed, a potential client is warmed up with a raging information field. The need to form and stimulate demand for virtual PBXs has flowed smoothly into traditional marketing, and now the service provider that is able to sell better than others, and not the one that is more technologically advanced, is successful. In our blog, we already wrote that the question “to be or not to be a cloudy PBX in the product line of the operator” has lost its relevance and the answer is obvious - “Of course, to be”. Therefore, the main problem today is to build an effective business model at the start of sales. We, as a vendor and developer of our own PaaS platform for telecom operators, turned gray in the field of telecom, are ready to share our experience and understanding of the market.
The telecom operator, which launched the new service, must understand and feel the product, understand to which Central Asia and with which offer it will go, in other words, it must be able to sell. Sometimes this skill comes too late or does not come at all, especially if sales are single. There are cases when cloud telephone services launched with fanfare were blown away in a year, right down to the project shutdown due to unintelligible financial indicators. This is completely wrong, because everything related to the clouds must be sold “with a whistle”, but for successful sales, proper and deep expertise is necessary.
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The operator introducing a new service, such an examination is likely to be absent. The question arises - how to get the much needed experience? The answer is simple: the vendor should have experience, provided that the vendor does not sit alone, raising money for technical support and one-time sales of licenses, but actively monitors the market and is directly involved in the business of his client. The ITooLabs business model has historically shaped this way. And just about it we would like to tell. It is likely that our experience, our business model, will be useful to colleagues and partners and competitors, and someone will take it into service.
We initially assumed that it was not very correct to give into the inept hands of a newbie partner rather complicated technological solution without further sales support. We earn TOGETHER with a partner, not ON partner, and this makes a great sense: a one-time shipment of licenses, no matter how attractive it would look, in terms of reducing operating systems, significantly increases business risks in the future. We are interested in our cloud PBX being sold and not looking at the world through the eyes of another half-forgotten landing page. We are interested in the market reaction to the product and we want to develop it on the basis of a live picture, and not just roadmaps born in the depths of the analytical department. This is how the ITooLabs business model, a kind of cloudy know-how, appeared: we collect all the statistics on already deployed PBXs (the so-called “Big Date”), constantly monitor and analyze the activity of existing users, form a practical, rather than theoretical, vision of needs. of the end. " Such expertise is invaluable and we share it with our partners from the best of intentions: take our knowledge, develop your service, and we will help to do it.
Schematically, the interaction scheme “We are our partner-operator” at the level of funds flow looks like this:
What do we offer? Let's designate the main points of the vendor-partner interaction scheme worked out over the years:
Inside our company, the fashionable term Big Data has increasingly begun to sound. It is clear that it is rightfully possible to operate with this word only when “Date”, really “Big”. The number of large installations of ITooLabs Communications Server exceeded 40 pieces, and the total number of platform users exceeds several tens of thousands. We mentioned this not in order to boast of achievements, but in order to make it clear that our “Big Date” is really significant amounts of information. In the field of cloud PBX, we are probably the only ones who can answer the question “Why did a woman search for a red coat and buy a green bag”. If blog readers are really interested - we will be happy to share the details.
We do not in any way deny the effectiveness of sales of telecommunications software using the “bought licenses and went to sell” scheme and in many cases this is justified, the money is earned from support, pre-sales updates, trainings, seminars and much more. All this works when the product is simple and clear and there is no sense in running around the partner-seller, blowing dust off him, he can do everything himself and is absolutely sure of success, once he decided to buy many, many licenses at once.
In the case of cloud-based PBX services, the situation is not as simple as it seems at first glance: A PBX should not just make calls (any PBX can do this), it should call as the client wants. At the same time (paradox!), When you first contact the seller, even the client himself does not know what he wants. This is what is called an “asymmetric product”. The client cannot, and should not, have a good understanding of the service right up to the time of its purchase, but the seller must perfectly know the service, otherwise the sale simply will not take place. Another thing is that when describing the cloud functionality with technical terms, the seller, in essence, puts the client’s need in the correct form. “I want the electric woman to say when they call,“ Hello, you called ... ”. It is at this stage that our business model is doing its best. The seller is very well prepared and knows that the real name of the “electric woman” is IVR, and the client, who heard from a friend about the fact that PBXs can speak with different voices depending on the weather in Moscow, was guaranteed to get what they wanted. To do this, you need to be able to see and predict trends, and we are doing just that.
In each new publication in our blog, we share the unique experience that we managed to accumulate over the long years of developing and studying the virtual PBX market. This experience has real value and we, as the owner of this experience, are very interested in its distribution, since both the vendor-developer and its partner operators play a single, common, very interesting and attractive game - the development and promotion of cloud services, and the cloud-based Services are what form markets now and set trends in the telecom business. We invite everyone to the discussion and we will be grateful for any feedback and questions.
To be continued…
The telecom operator, which launched the new service, must understand and feel the product, understand to which Central Asia and with which offer it will go, in other words, it must be able to sell. Sometimes this skill comes too late or does not come at all, especially if sales are single. There are cases when cloud telephone services launched with fanfare were blown away in a year, right down to the project shutdown due to unintelligible financial indicators. This is completely wrong, because everything related to the clouds must be sold “with a whistle”, but for successful sales, proper and deep expertise is necessary.
')
The operator introducing a new service, such an examination is likely to be absent. The question arises - how to get the much needed experience? The answer is simple: the vendor should have experience, provided that the vendor does not sit alone, raising money for technical support and one-time sales of licenses, but actively monitors the market and is directly involved in the business of his client. The ITooLabs business model has historically shaped this way. And just about it we would like to tell. It is likely that our experience, our business model, will be useful to colleagues and partners and competitors, and someone will take it into service.
Business model
We initially assumed that it was not very correct to give into the inept hands of a newbie partner rather complicated technological solution without further sales support. We earn TOGETHER with a partner, not ON partner, and this makes a great sense: a one-time shipment of licenses, no matter how attractive it would look, in terms of reducing operating systems, significantly increases business risks in the future. We are interested in our cloud PBX being sold and not looking at the world through the eyes of another half-forgotten landing page. We are interested in the market reaction to the product and we want to develop it on the basis of a live picture, and not just roadmaps born in the depths of the analytical department. This is how the ITooLabs business model, a kind of cloudy know-how, appeared: we collect all the statistics on already deployed PBXs (the so-called “Big Date”), constantly monitor and analyze the activity of existing users, form a practical, rather than theoretical, vision of needs. of the end. " Such expertise is invaluable and we share it with our partners from the best of intentions: take our knowledge, develop your service, and we will help to do it.
Schematically, the interaction scheme “We are our partner-operator” at the level of funds flow looks like this:
What do we offer? Let's designate the main points of the vendor-partner interaction scheme worked out over the years:
- ITooLabs works on the model of revenue sharing, i.e. we do not sell licenses for packages of a thousand pieces, but we offer, without the cost of implementation, to launch a cloud platform and deduct a percentage of the income received. This significantly increases the trust of the partner and he understands that thereby guaranteeing the demand for service. No one will claim royalties where the product does not enter the market.
- From the moment of the very first launch of the service, we began to save and analyze the activities of end users. This is a truly unique experience and can be obtained in only one way - to study the user experience (ustomer experience). It should be noted that this approach is rare in the “big telecom”, and we think that we are one of the few who know how to do it.
- We do not just analyze user experience, we also analyze sales technologies of existing partners. We look at the most successful projects, identify trends and techniques. This expertise is very important for sellers, they can use the already-ready “Book of Sales” and not waste time searching for optimal ways. Ways exist and confirmed. The invention of the next bike is hardly justified.
- We train the engineering personnel of operators. One of the prerequisites for success is a properly configured and stable service, and technical support is the service with which the client will interact throughout the entire life cycle of his client life. Technicians are simply obliged to radiate calm and competence.
- We analyze all the collected information and use it to develop and implement only the requested functionality, improve the platform, starting only from the real needs of the market. Therefore, our partners can be sure that if the button is on the left and not on the right, and with the next update a new feature has appeared and the old one has disappeared, then this is a well-calculated and justified step.
- We integrate with third-party services, both client and carrier. We offer customers integration with the most sought-after CRMs out of the box, and partner operators are given the opportunity to use boxed integration with proven billing. That's right: everything starts to work out of the box and does not require tedious and long development. And we and the operator want to go to the first money as quickly as possible. Time does not wait. The ecosystem of IP and billing that has grown around ITooLabs is our pride and an additional source of monetization services for a partner.
- In some cases, we offer operators not only to take advantage of our sales book, but offer to jointly optimize business processes in a commercial service. It's funny, but sometimes “big telecom” may not see the simplest things that interfere with the effective work of merchants. There are examples when the most “big business” was selling clouds in Excel, and CRM was used only for mass products.
Big data
Inside our company, the fashionable term Big Data has increasingly begun to sound. It is clear that it is rightfully possible to operate with this word only when “Date”, really “Big”. The number of large installations of ITooLabs Communications Server exceeded 40 pieces, and the total number of platform users exceeds several tens of thousands. We mentioned this not in order to boast of achievements, but in order to make it clear that our “Big Date” is really significant amounts of information. In the field of cloud PBX, we are probably the only ones who can answer the question “Why did a woman search for a red coat and buy a green bag”. If blog readers are really interested - we will be happy to share the details.
We do not in any way deny the effectiveness of sales of telecommunications software using the “bought licenses and went to sell” scheme and in many cases this is justified, the money is earned from support, pre-sales updates, trainings, seminars and much more. All this works when the product is simple and clear and there is no sense in running around the partner-seller, blowing dust off him, he can do everything himself and is absolutely sure of success, once he decided to buy many, many licenses at once.
In the case of cloud-based PBX services, the situation is not as simple as it seems at first glance: A PBX should not just make calls (any PBX can do this), it should call as the client wants. At the same time (paradox!), When you first contact the seller, even the client himself does not know what he wants. This is what is called an “asymmetric product”. The client cannot, and should not, have a good understanding of the service right up to the time of its purchase, but the seller must perfectly know the service, otherwise the sale simply will not take place. Another thing is that when describing the cloud functionality with technical terms, the seller, in essence, puts the client’s need in the correct form. “I want the electric woman to say when they call,“ Hello, you called ... ”. It is at this stage that our business model is doing its best. The seller is very well prepared and knows that the real name of the “electric woman” is IVR, and the client, who heard from a friend about the fact that PBXs can speak with different voices depending on the weather in Moscow, was guaranteed to get what they wanted. To do this, you need to be able to see and predict trends, and we are doing just that.
In each new publication in our blog, we share the unique experience that we managed to accumulate over the long years of developing and studying the virtual PBX market. This experience has real value and we, as the owner of this experience, are very interested in its distribution, since both the vendor-developer and its partner operators play a single, common, very interesting and attractive game - the development and promotion of cloud services, and the cloud-based Services are what form markets now and set trends in the telecom business. We invite everyone to the discussion and we will be grateful for any feedback and questions.
To be continued…
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297018/
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