Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Demand

The global VoIP services market is set to reach £108 billion by 2021, according to a recent report by MarketResearchStore.com. SMEs are turning to trusted advisors, amongst their current suppliers, for help once they have identified a need.

IT and Telecoms companies are looking for reliable suppliers who can provide not just market-leading solutions at the best possible price, but also support to ensure customer requirements are uncovered and addressed to their satisfaction.

Recommended sales approach

Don’t be tempted to reel off all the features. A good place to start is asking questions. What’s their current situation? How do they currently manage calls?

What problem is the customer trying to solve and are they aware of the problem? What is causing them headaches with their current phone system?

What’s the implication? Agree with the customer what the problems and deficiencies of the current situation are really costing the business.

What’s the need pay-off? How valuable would a different solution be to the business? Can this be quantified?

According to the 2016 Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index, mobile data consumption is to grow sevenfold by 2021. By the end of the forecast period, mobile data is projected to account for 20% of total internet traffic, up from just 8% in 2016.

Smartphones will account for more than 50% of connected devices and the number of smartphones is predicted to rise to 6.2 billion by 2021. Mobile video is to grow 870% making up 78% of total mobile traffic due to the wide adoption of live video, AR and VR. Data networks offloading to wi-fi is also to soar.

Business consumption increases as 4G is being increasingly utilised in areas of slower fixed connectivity and for connected devices nationwide. The challenge for businesses is how to manage the cost.

Unlike FTTC, which is largely unlimited (usually with a fair use policy), mobile data is sold with monthly usage allowances and financial penalties for over-usage. Until recently pricing has been high and there has been no easy management portal.

As speeds increase and prices tumble, mobile data revenues are likely to soar. To allow resellers to manage large estates of mobile data SIMs, Jola has developed Mobile Manager. Mobile Manager handles SIM activations, ceases, suspensions, reports, alerts and bolt-ons.

Who are Openreach?

Openreach owns the pipes and cables that connect the majority of homes and businesses in the UK to the national broadband and phone networks. It is owned by BT.

What was the issue?

BT was accused of abusing the monopoly by underinvesting in the broadband infrastructure and charging over the odds for services. There were ongoing calls for the regulator Ofcom to force a split between Openreach and BT.

What happened?

Eventually Ofcom announced that BT would legally separate from its Openreach subsidiary, describing it as a “significant day” for consumers.

Openreach will soon become a distinct company with its own staff and management. Ofcom says the new Openreach will have “its own strategy and a legal purpose to serve all of its customers equally”.

When working on a deal, answering queries quickly can make a big difference to the outcome. Partners want information at their fingertips to ensure their customers have the detail they need to decide on a solution. How do you access this information?

Via Account Managers

In the channel, we tend to use Account Managers and portals. Each partner is given a dedicated Account Manager who can be contacted by phone or email during business hours. By picking up the phone or forwarding a query from a customer, they can usually get the answer they need quite quickly.

Via Portals

There are partners who prefer self-service. These partners use portals and look for answers to sales or support queries whilst on the phone to their customers.

Via Quoting Tools

Some portals go a step further and build branded sales proposals, inserting key product information as the quote builds. Partners can edit these proposals before sending to end users, who can also amend and accept terms and conditions to place the order.

Popular requests

The most popular documentation requests are for feature and benefit descriptions and comparison documents for both supplier services and their competitors. Partners want to be armed with all the USPs to meet customer requirements, solve problems and beat any competitive bids.

Finding voice and data suppliers with the right products and services at the right price, who you can trust to deliver and support services, is the dream. On paper multiple suppliers seem to be offering similar products at comparable pricing, so how do you effectively select the right supplier for your business?

Research

It helps to be clear on what you are looking for. Is this a one-off relationship to help a valued client? Are you planning to increase ARPU by introducing a new revenue stream? Are you actively targeting a new market?

Your objectives will help to define how much time and money you are prepared to invest, your required buy prices and how much margin you need to make it work. You may well have also decided whether you will be billing and supporting services yourselves or looking for a supplier to take on these functions.

Armed with this information you are able to start your research and draw up a short list of companies to talk to.

Useful questions to ask prospective suppliers

• How many partners do you currently support?
• What are your best-selling products?
• Which is your highest revenue stream?
• How long have you been providing channel services?
• What billing models are available?
• What automated systems are available for partners?
• Is training available?
• What are your target installation times?
• What is the average response time to a partner request?
• What is your staff turnover?
• What is your churn rate?
• How much does it cost to sign up as a partner?
• What is your partner on-boarding process?
• Do you assist with end user contracts and marketing collateral?
• Do you have a published price list and do you offer volume discounts?
• Are there any volume targets?
• Is your support 24/7?

Definition of success

The financial rewards that come from being successful in business are of course important to most entrepreneurs. Other factors may be more personal, the satisfaction of creating a business and running it the way you have always felt businesses should be run, or providing complete customer satisfaction and an environment your team never want to leave.

Measuring success

Working in the business it may feel as if all is well, but verifiable data is required to confirm this. One of the best measures of success is profitability against plan. Understanding the peaks and troughs in revenues and analysing margin by product can help to identify cash cows and problem children within the product portfolio.  Cash flow forecasting is a good measure to ensure the future financial success of the company.

Successful verticals

Successful IT and Telecommunications companies find their niche and develop strong relationships with their customers by delivering exceptional service. Often they will specialise in solving key problems in vertical markets, perhaps by building on an early win. They tend to be in-tune with their customers and the first to be contacted when services and hardware need to be upgraded. Most are agile and flexible and will seek out likeminded suppliers, to meet requirements for services they do not currently offer. 

What can we learn from our past?

The Jola management team worked at Griffin Internet for over ten years together. Our CTO invented white-label managed broadband by developing MOPS, a platform to allow resellers to provide ‘own-branded’ broadband connections directly. We promoted it as ‘ISP in a box’. In our first few years we added over 800 partners to the platform, including market leading suppliers in the channel today.

Most commentators felt that when fixed broadband was fast, reliable and affordable, it would become the conduit for SMEs to run their cloud applications over.

We learnt that having a management portal, with APIs into multiple carriers, allowed us to grow significantly without investing heavily in additional resource. It gave our channel partners the ability to increase ARPU, whilst retaining the control of the customer experience end-to-end.

We helped the channel to benefit from the rise in demand for white label internet connectivity from DSL to fibre and leased circuits. We are ready to do this again with mobile data.

The Mobile Data Opportunity

Mobile data has, until recently, been slow, unreliable and expensive. There is an issue with ‘bill shock’, as users regularly go over their allowances and are unprepared for the high cost of overages.

Without tools to manage large estates of SIMs and prevent or manage over-use, resellers have felt helpless and vulnerable. Many have supplied mobile data only when requested to do so by customers and many have introduced them to a carrier essentially giving up their customer.

What the experts say

Marketing bodies suggest between five and ten percent of annual revenue, if you are a company turning over less than £5 million annually.

The reality

It depends on a number of different factors, such as the type of industry you work in and the objectives and culture of the business. Some companies rely heavily on word of mouth and so don’t have a set marketing budget. Others have high growth targets and lots of competitors, so tend to have a much more detailed marketing strategy, which includes reforecasts and reporting on return.

It really depends on individual company objectives and often comes down to what the business can afford. Within a sales-orientated culture with a marketing team that is aligned and integrated, you are more likely to see marketing budgets and ROI targets. In project-orientated environments, marketing budget is often allocated on a project-by-project basis, for example a product launch or a re-branding exercise.

The importance of planning

However much you spend, it is helpful to outline objectives and set targets before you start to invest time and money. Don’t get disheartened if results do not materialise overnight, you may need multiple touches and time to hone your key messages.

It is essential to test market methods to see which combination provides the best return, before investing heavily. So many factors can alter business objectives, so it is important to be able to build in additional activity or scale back to meet budget restrictions as required. Negotiating shorter contract periods can help to facilitate this.

Budget by activity

According to recent research by Forrester, the average firm allocated 30% of their annual marketing budget to online activity and this is set to increase. This makes sense as a company’s online presence is essentially their shop window and online marketing is relatively inexpensive, yet is easy to track, monitor and edit.

A recent report by Program suggests a larger percentage is spent on email marketing with more traditional marketing activity such as tradeshows, events, direct mail, PR, print, outdoor and radio advertising, listed at less than 30%. These activities can often cost more but can be less frequent. It is important to try and calculate the potential lifetime value of any new business that could be won against the total marketing investment.

Who is buying fast business broadband?

The obvious answer is anyone that needs one, but in our experience business customers are particularly seeking out fast fibre broadband circuits when upgrading from traditional to hosted telephony.

Broadband is the common term for a fast connection to the Internet. It allows business users to browse the web faster, stream video, have real-time voice conversations, use cloud applications and backup their data online.

Fibre broadband promises super-fast speeds. The name comes from the use of plastic or glass cables, which allow for faster data transfer, compared to the standard copper wires.

Business customers are asking their IT and Telephony suppliers for help when looking to upgrade their business phone systems. They want to talk to specialists who can review their office networks and suggest cost effective alternatives.

With hosted telephony you don’t need PSTN, ISDN or SIP trunks, there is no phone system on site to maintain and packages are priced on a per-seat-per-month basis. Companies can have the latest handsets and a feature-rich phone system to include Auto Attendant, Instant Messenger, Presence and Video and can make, take and transfer calls from their mobile or tablet remotely as if sat at their desk. They can connect the phone system to internal databases so that customer details ‘pop’ onto the screen and they can click-to-dial from documents and web pages. HD voice is available and running voice over a dedicated fibre broadband connection is a good way to protect call quality.

It is hard to achieve a good experience for all customers at all times.  Technology can fail, third parties can let you down and, despite your best efforts, end customers can feel like their issue is not being resolved fast enough.

Understanding how to best differentiate your proposition is a question many marketing, sales and product specialists are revisiting on a regular basis. It is hard to sell on the basis of customer service. Everyone will claim that their customers rate them very highly and prospects just expect this to be the case anyway. However, once you have satisfied customers you are less likely to lose them on price and more likely to win customers from your competitors, for whom customer service may be less of a priority.

What constitutes great customer service has changed over the years. It is no longer enough to answer the phones within 10 seconds and respond promptly to emails. Resellers, dealers and their end business customers expect more.

Putting the customer in the driving seat

Self-service portals are expected and if you don’t have the know-how or resource to develop systems in house you probably choose suppliers that do. Simply being able to order products online is no longer sufficient and the best customer experience occurs when every aspect of the ordering, provisioning and support journey is considered., Resellers and dealers need to be able to order multiple services in one journey, create branded click-to-order quotes and be able to extend online features to their own customers. The best companies are going one step further by creating management portals that anticipate and solve real business problems. Mobile data is a recent example. As coverage has improved and costs have come down, businesses that want to make more use of mobile data have been put off by unpredictable overage charges and their inability to manage large estates of mobile data SIMs. Mobile Manager has for the first time given resellers and their customers the tools to activate, swap, pause and cease SIMs through an intuitive, easy to use portal.

Two big initiatives

When it comes to enhancing the customer experience, customer journey mapping and personalisation are the two big initiatives. As marketers we can learn from the behaviour of our prospects and customers and customise our approaches and promotions accordingly.

The impact on growth and profit

Good customer experience is not just about a feel-good factor. Companies with higher customer satisfaction scores grow faster, are more profitable and worth more.