Your Vendor Wants You to Sell Well

This equipment maker understands that selling SMB VoIP services may be new to service providers, and it has a plan to help handle the unfamiliar.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 30, 2007]

After writing about Natural Convergence's VoIP sales support in the article How to Sell VoIP to Small Business Customers, we're then contacted by Metaswitch, who are doing something similar but more ambitious.

The company offers its service provider customers:

• VoIP Marketing Workshop
• Small/Medium Business (SMB) Solutions Resource Package
• Residential Solutions Resource Package
• 20/20 Vision Market Research and Segmentation Services
• M³ Public Relations Program (in partnership with Connect2 Communications)
• Service Provider Direct Marketing

The company calls the whole package MarketVisions and claims in its press release, "MarketVisions goes well beyond a 'quick start' recipe book of generic off-the-shelf materials."

So why did you build it? Andy Randall, Metaswitch vice president of marketing (and ISPCON regular), tells us, "it came from listening to the customers, who were in many cases ISPs deploying VoIP for the first time. Some were telcos who had experience selling traditional voice but did not know how to sell a PBX or differentiate their VoIP offering."

Service providers want help on basic stuff? Randall says that service providers often buy a Metaswitch product to solve a specific, immediate problem, and then later realize that they can do more with what they've purchased. "In the last year, we have had no end of calls from marketing departments saying, 'our engineers bought this switch, can you tell us what we can do with it.' Once it's up and running, they are moved to think about the enhanced services they could deploy."

The idea is this simple: Metaswitch wants to share best practices among its customer base. The ILECs and the cable companies and the cellular companies have associations that do this, but the ISPs do not. "It is hard to do this. We have a broad range of customers," says Randall. "At our last Customer Forum, we had over 450 attendees representing all types of service providers from ISPs through the small ILECs to some of the largest ILECs—from regional CLECs to one town CLECs to cable companies. They're all grappling with similar issues."

So provide us one simple insight. "Service providers jump on the idea that the SMB market is underserved and that hosted PBX is great for that market. We agree, but what we've seen is that service providers think that's the totality of the solution they need to enter the marketplace. Many end users already have PBXs and a sunk investment in phones on desks and equipment on desks. You will not convince them to change to a hosted PBX. Most of the revenue in the SMB market comes from merging a PBX to a converged IP trunk. You use VoIP but convert it to a traditional connection to the PBX so that they don't have to change anything."

Once you prove yourself, you'll be in a good position if the business needs to replace the PBX. "When the PBX comes to the end of its life, if you're the service provider at that point, then you can migrate the customer and get those high margins."

Customers do have much to gain from true VoIP instead of a hybrid system. "Functionally, there are advantages to a hosted solution. It makes disaster recovery easier because the service provider can take care of backup and the customer can take the phones and plug them in at a different location and be up and running. But SMBs are really focused on total cost of ownership and if they've just spent $50,000 on a PBX and phones, they won't want to get rid of it if it's reliable."

Pricing
Most of the material is free, accessible through a web portal. Services that require consultation are not free. A one day VoIP Workshop, for example, could cost a few thousand dollars, Randall says. A number of people from Metaswitch and from market research company Savatar would participate, discussing customer needs. There would be a two and a half hour presentation followed by breakout sessions. "The service provider would choose topics from a long list of what we could cover. Following the day long session, we write up a plan and provide branding materials and other customized deliverables."

In summary, Randall says, "We want this program to succeed. If our customers are successful, we're successful. It took a lot of work behind the scenes but now we think that within our space we have the most comprehensive marketing program. We think every ISP should look to its vendors for support."

—End