One of the main focus points for 9 as a company is to provide their partners with all the information, skills, support and guidance necessary to ensure they can sell their products successfully.
As of January 2015, after IDC released a report that forecasted the cloud technology market was set to reach $200 billion by 2018, it was clear that cloud was going to have a huge role to play in the future and that cloud telephony was going play a large part in that growth, as companies began their journeys into the cloud and away from on-premises solutions.
As a result, 9 spent the next 2.5 years evolving their cloud product set and working with their partners to help them enter this evolving market and capitalise on its astronomical growth.
In order to find out more about what steps they took to achieve this goal, we decided to have a talk with 9’s Director of Partners, Adam Cathcart, to hear what he had to say.
The first thing he told us was how 9 has spent a lot of time over the last few years working with its partners to help them understand the benefits of cloud, how to present those benefits to their customers and how to transition their organisations to go on that journey as well.
One of the major selling points of cloud lies in its scalability, fast deployment and the added value of being able to offer a subscription type solution, rather than a one-off sale of a PBX solution.
For partners who have come from a traditional-PBX background, however, Cathcart states that making that change is incredibly difficult and requires an entire switch up in how sales are pitched and how models are constructed.
“For partners from traditional PBX backgrounds that are used to working on leasing models and getting vast amounts of cash up front on each deal, for them to then change and move to a hosted model, where they could be charging anywhere between £5-£15 a month to a customer is very different and very difficult for them to be able to transform their organisations to be able to do that.”
To resolve these issues, Cathcart adds, 9 works with partners to help them to be able to go on that journey, help them to manage that transition process, help them to develop ways to remunerate their sales guys as well as being able to transition their business to that recurring revenue model.
