Before you can even start to talk about unified communications, you’d better be able to tell your customers what exactly it is.
What is unified communications? “Some people think it’s just VoIP [voice-over-IP telephony] but it’s not,” says Leon Friend, product technical specialist at Avnet. A better definition might include all the things that unified communications does.
For a start, it ties lots of media together, such as voice, video, email and instant messaging. It does it in real-time and often in places outside of the office – in fact, anywhere an employee needs to work.
Vendors describe the goal of unified communications as providing a single experience, in the office or on the road. That single experience can raise productivity, lower costs and improve efficiency in a business. It’s a great story for your customers – but a hard one to sell and turn into reality. The upside is less competition and higher margins, which is a worthy goal for any reseller business.
Step 1: Assess your skill sets
While unified communications can be a highly technical area and an integration minefield, familiarity with the hardware and software is only half the game. The real battle is learning to deal with the breathing, fleshy part of the solution – the end user. Engineers and administrators deploying servers, firewalls and switches have most of their conversations with the IT manager.
Unified communications, on the other hand, is a business process and requires dealing with the end user who, unfortunately, may not always know the answer to critical questions.
Users sometimes need help outlining all the scenarios in which they use the phone and how this works in the business. Building a user profile for each employee requires strong consulting skills, which aren’t easy to find.
“We are having to hire more people who realise this is not a box to install,” Tom Morgan, CEO of unified communications reseller eVideo Communications, says. He sees his competitors struggling with “legacy staff” in technical or sales who don’t understand the difficulties in selling and installing UC.
“Most of our people are a lot younger, but we hire for will and then train them for skill. There’s no point having a skilful person who knows it all but doesn’t convey it to the customer,” Morgan says.
“We prefer to get the right attitude and then train them more rather than have them skilled and trained up in the old ways.”
If your business can’t afford the outlay on staff or training, then perhaps look at leaving the integration work to a full-service vendor, such as the cloud-based M5 Networks.
The key business stakeholders are very different, too. The power communications user in almost every organisation is the receptionist – whose opinion on a solution’s usability might carry more weight than the IT manager’s.
“You have to talk to the receptionist and cover off all their concerns,” Avnet’s Friend says. “A lot of key business stakeholders will consider that as long as the receptionist is happy we know we can receive all our phone messages.”
Bigger organisations might require conversations with the call-centre manager rather than the IT department or CEO. This requires again a very different sales cycle and more demonstrations before winning the sale.
Step 2: Choose a communications platform
What communications platform will best suit your business? Different vendors have their own sets of requirements and approaches. Some will be more compatible with your organisation than others.
Instead of learning everything from scratch, look for a vendor that complements products you already work with.
If you are strong in Microsoft products then look at a voice vendor with strong Microsoft voice integration, Friend says. This doesn’t automatically mean choosing Microsoft, however, which Friend says can be very complicated to install.
One temptation is to select your current networking vendor for its VoIP range. Advantages include familiarity with the vendor’s other products, its culture and the way its channel operates. Selling more of one vendor’s range often means better pricing across the board, rebates or other benefits.
But Friend says resellers should consider carefully whether to put all their eggs in the one basket. “While it is good doing a lot with one vendor, if your customer decides not to go with that vendor for whatever reason you’re going to find it very hard to keep that engagement with them.”
Offering a greater choice by supporting two VoIP vendors will make the customer feel like you’re interested in helping identify the best solution rather than just clocking up another sale.
However, the complexity of unified communications means there is often a lot of overhead in certifications and training or extra staff hires to sell solutions.
These costs need to be balanced against the benefits of offering two vendors.
“If you go with two you’ve potentially got to spend twice as much training up. It’s not necessarily the right decision,” Friend says.
A VoIP vendor with a track record of working with your networking vendor is likely to have a complementary range. Don’t expect they will recognise each other’s certifications, though.
Make sure the product you want to sell is capable of delivering a high quality of service, says NEC solution strategist Steve Woff.
“It’s all about quality when it comes to voice. It has to be flawless, it can’t suffer from delays.”
A product should fit your customers’ intended usage, Woff says. Multiple sites need to survive in a disaster; if the WAN goes down the customer will still expect to make a phone call. The same goes for blackouts.
Security is another area to consider. Encrypted calls and messages, lockdown passwords and PIN codes on systems to avoid phishing attacks are all useful features, Woff says.
Step 3: Understand interoperability
Integration is a key aspect of the implementation phase. “No customer has a greenfield site,” C2C Consultants’ Eva Shafer says. “The manufacturers say a lot of things about interoperability but the reseller needs to understand the interoperability relationships between vendors.”
Interoperability takes different forms depending on the vendor. Shafer gives the example of Cisco and Microsoft, who she says have very different approaches to unified communications. Microsoft looks to the desktop as a platform for its UC software; Cisco’s focus is on the meeting room where a hardware solution is more appropriate for one-to- many communications.
Some resellers have baulked at the integration step and left pieces of the puzzle unfinished, letting the project fall short of customer expectations. M5 Networks’ John Hendry emphasises the importance of delivering a full solution that ties into business processes rather than a basic communications system. Most CRM platforms, from Business Dynamics to Salesforce, have the ability to integrate with phone systems using connection points.
“The reseller needs to look for those possible linkages and then bring them to occur, not just [deliver] the promise of them.
“The manual on page three will say it can be connected to the phone system but it is really important for the reseller to make it happen because otherwise it won’t.”
One tip is to go for vendors that support open standards, as these are more likely to be interoperable. Some examples are Juniper, Siemens and Shoretel.
“The cost of sale is lower (with open-standards vendors) because you don’t have to build in a lot of extra services cost in order to make it work,” Avnet’s Friend says. “The more proprietary stuff there is, the harder it is to make sure it will all work together.”
Step 4: Write your business case
Some UC training programs are relatively expensive and take a long time. A strong business case will justify the number of staff required and their certification levels.
It is impossible to cover every area of UC; the contact centre market alone is huge and requires dedicated resources to tackle, for example. Make sure your business plan identifies the minimum number and cost of certifications required to cover the technology and the target customer market, without eating up all your margin.
And don’t forget to write a timetable for staff training so that you know your capacity for taking on projects.
“It’s very easy to get in a spiralling situation where all you’ve got is guys off doing certification after certification to meet vendor requirements,” Friend says. “While you need those guys to be certified
you need them to be out there selling and installing otherwise all those certs count for nothing.”
Video-conferencing vendors have “raised the bar” in checking certifications, Morgan says. He has watched a lot of audio-visual companies drop out of selling video-conferencing because it was too difficult.
And as a consequence he says has picked up a lot of business from dissatisfied customers.
“Their bread and butter was doing a couple of boardrooms and projectors but when it came to video- conferencing it was too complicated,” Morgan says. “If you don’t know the products and you don’t know how to implement it on various networks then you don’t get the cert and you can’t sell the product.”
Morgan estimates his VC team spends at least 10 hours a month on vendor portals checking software releases, new products and updating certifications. And it’s not just the engineers.
High-definition video-conferencing vendor Lifesize (now owned by Logitech) requires sales people to carry certifications too.
Most UC vendors take a layered approach where resellers start with a basic certification and then specialise. A common progression is to end up with a team that covers the generalities of UC and can bring in a specialist when needed.
Disties and vendors are on call to help with specialisations to provide coverage and backup. “This is where knowing your marketing vertical helps you make sure you’ve got the right skill sets,” Friend says. For example, certifying to support contact centres costs a lot but if no-one does it in your vertical then you’re wasting a lot of time and money.
Vendors are often willing to sit down and help you decide where to go.
Step 5: Become a firewall expert
“The biggest problem is firewalls,” eVideo’s Morgan says. Firewall traversal is essential to most unified communications installations.
It allows employees to communicate with others outside the intranet without opening up the general network to outsiders.
Morgan says even though he sends out pre-install documentation to IT managers, his team still needs to do a lot of handholding when it comes to which ports to open and how many. “Internal IT managers don’t know that you have a certain amount of ports in each location. Video conferencing is not into latency and jitter; it’s got to be the same speed going up and back.
“There is a lot of consultancy we have to do in video conferencing, even with customers that have had standard definition video and we’re replacing it with high definition. Going from ISDN to broadband is not as simple as everyone thinks – that you just plug it in.”
This is where certifications are worth their money – properly certified engineers know the difference between network integration for video conferencing compared to PCs. “Our team is in constant training mode. The challenges with what we do is that a lot of our staff are in training all the time,” Morgan says.
Step 6: Pick your target market
It is worth taking unified communications to one niche first and get used to doing it there before doing it in other niches. “You need to look at your level of engagement and where you’re going to start, how it fits in with your market verticals and make sure it matches your business,” Avnet’s Friend says.
Make sure you’re not overselling a solution to a customer who can’t afford it – or won’t be able to take full advantage of the technology. Pieter deGunst from Tecala, a UC integrator, says he doesn’t see much point in selling UC to a single-site office of 10 people.
Instant messaging and voice and video collaboration in that situation would be overkill unless the staff are using it to communicate with customers, says deGunst. “Our [UC] customers have multiple sites, travelling remote workers, overseas offices, executives on the road . . .”
The early sales pitch for voice over IP telephony – saving on call costs – doesn’t stack up in the SMB sector “unless they have expensive telephony costs”, deGunst says.
“Typically when you’re looking at a UC system it’s not there to save money. A lot of vendors have gone out there and tried to do an ROI or TCO on that alone and caused a lot of damage.”
Step 7: Assess your support
It follows that if your staff are now dealing with end users and not just the IT manager, they are likely to get many more support requests. Stepping up to UC might mean beefing up the help desk and ticketing systems to service customers, handle feature or change requests.
“You’re handling potentially a lot more small and niggly requests,” Avnet’s Friend says. “It’s not as simple as ‘can you open up this port on the firewall’.”
Sometimes troubleshooting will mean initiating a short consulting session to identify the problem and find a solution.
“We had one this morning where a guy came up and said ‘my forwarding is not working’,” Friend says. The employee wanted calls to his mobile phone to ring on his desk phone simultaneously, a common UC feature.
However, he also wanted to forward all his calls to someone else – a completely contradictory request. The solution was to sit down and work out the business process the employee wanted to achieve and then decide the simplest way to program it.
When a support ticket comes through for a handset change, it almost always requires talking to the end user to figure out what they’re talking about, Friend says, which requires more effort. “The advantage is that you have a deeper relationship with your customer so you can sell them a much wider range of products and services.”
Step 8: Update your marketing
Ironically, specialising in unified communications means you can legitimately call yourself a one-stop shop – at least, as far as the network is concerned.
Your customers can now trust you to monitor and manage all audio, video, voice and data traffic, which makes it easier to identify problems as they arise.
Many businesses are yet to take that step towards a single network supplier, say UC distributors and resellers. “There are very few companies that are putting it all in one basket. They still have analogue ports for phones and faxes,” eVideo’s Morgan says.
Consolidating responsibility to one party buys customers peace of mind knowing they don’t need to get caught in buck passing between a handful of service providers when something goes wrong. This has a tangible value which needs to be explained and priced accordingly.
For the reseller it means a greater share of the customer’s wallet and a more intimate understanding of their business, which makes for a stickier, longer relationship. All good things to aim for.
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