How 9 Helps Businesses Expand Their Portfolio with Hosted Voice

How IT, Mobile and PBX resellers can start selling hosted voice 

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Unified Communications

Published: October 26, 2017

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

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.

“One of the ways 9 helps Partners make this transition is by offering a leasing model for hosted services, as well as recurring revenue, thus giving them the flexibility to pick and choose between the two, depending on their needs.”

As well as scalability, another huge benefit for businesses switching to the cloud is the massive improvement in mobility options and how mobile applications now allow people to take their phone system with them wherever they go.

“With this in mind, 9 has spent a lot of time working with partners who have that background in traditional PBXs and have been training them to be able to have that wider discussion around remote working and the tools and devices that people can use to access these applications.”

By recognising the potential of cloud as a sticky product and a complete solution that covers multiple platforms, 9 seeks to increase the success of their partners by training them to engage confidently in sales opportunities that would ordinarily have been out of their comfort zone.

After asking Cathcart if there’s anything else 9 are doing to help their partners make that transition from traditional PBX into the cloud, he informed us of the company’s accreditation process that encompasses everything from talking about the product to understanding the product itself, but really being able to develop a clear demonstration process that they can then deliver to their customers with confidence.

In a sense, 9’s approach to how it helps its partners is based around a gradual transition that eases them into the cloud gently and gives them the chance to learn how to sell products successfully at a comfortable pace.

By offering alternative leasing models for cloud services, 9 allows its partners to still profit from the old techniques until they understand and can implement the new ones fully, while an in-depth accreditation process works to provide extensive training and instill confidence in the business as a qualified cloud provider.

Want to find out more about how to move to selling Hosted Voice with 9? Visit the 9 Partner website. 

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