Understanding The Benefits Of Selling Voice-Over-Ip Solutions
Once the right product mix and channel marketing and support programs are in place, we are going to see VoIP adoption rates explode. It's a great market for solution providers, but not just because it offers you the ability to cut your customers' overall costs,it also affords you the option of offering new functionality that will bring productivity gains.
John Chambers and Cisco have been singing about the inevitable piggy-backing of voice onto the data network for years. Many,me included,have spouted off about how it won't happen easily because the perception and the reality were that voice networks were more reliable than data.
But that has been changing. An example I'm reluctant to even use is that dreadful day Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists took down the Twin Towers. That day sparked a huge evaluation of disaster-recovery methods. Of note was that while the phone networks,both land-line and cellular,were taxed beyond capacity, remarkably the Internet held together.
While much of the talk about VoIP has been centered around enterprise accounts, the technology isn't limited to that customer set. Integrators can pitch to all customers the benefits of lower long-term costs that result from lower transmission charges, coupled with more features.
I'll give you an example. Scott Frankel, president of Animatic Media,a first-class event-production and digital multimedia company on Long Island that CMP uses to produce some of our events,recently bought a VoIP solution for his small business of eight employees.
NorVergence, a Newark, N.J.-based solution provider, cold-called Scott to pitch him on the system. Now, if you know Scott, just getting to that part is difficult.
"I'm really hard on these guys. I hung up on him four times, and if anyone even gets me on the phone it's usually because they lied to my assistant," he said. "I told him if a salesman came in and tried to sell me on something that was going to cost me money, I was going to physically remove him from the building."
What happened, however, was NorVergence told Scott that a VoIP system would reduce his phone costs 30 percent, so he agreed to hear the pitch. "And that's exactly what happened," Scott told me, noting that he was able to ditch his DSL line by moving to the new, Nortel-based system and has shaved off more than $250 from his formerly $800 monthly phone bill.
This story is an example of why I believe this space is a real opportunity for solution providers who are looking to get into new accounts.
By the way, Scott's story is a classic example of how solution providers create demand. Nortel got that business because of NorVergence. All the lead-generating programs in the world from Nortel wouldn't have produced that sale.
I'm excited about this technology because you can also bring in conferencing, desktop-sharing and the ability to have the system find the employee by polling several phone numbers until it locates them. But most importantly, VoIP is something that can be sold to small, midsize and large businesses.
It also offers an opportunity for solution providers moving into the home-networking market. Converging the home data and entertainment networks with land-line and cell-phone networks is also going to be an opportunity, but that's a story for our new publication, Digital Connect, which will be launched in January.
Make something happen. I can be reached at (516) 562-7812 or via e-mail at [email protected].