Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

This is the question I get asked the most from Jola partners. It doesn’t have an easy answer and there is no one successful formula. What I suggest often surprises partners, but has proven to work time and time again.

What do you want to sell to whom?

Selling new products into a new market is the most challenging approach, as there are no known factors or existing relationships to build on. This strategy needs the most planning and investment and has the longest ROI, however by establishing clear objectives and a budget you can start working on a strategy.

Start with the basics

Add product overviews, features and benefits to your website. Create compelling packages and offers to attract your target audience. Focus on a strong call to action to generate leads. Think about competitive offers and how your offer differs. Put yourself in the position of your prospective customers. What problems do they have? What options are available to solve this problem? At what cost? How could your solution best meet these requirements? Make sure this information is clearly visible, easy to download and that you are responsive to their first enquiry.

Building a communications strategy to promote new products into a new audience is the next challenge. Attracting your target audience to the website via adverts, social media, email marketing and combining this with more traditional methods, such as direct mail, PR and advertising is key. Building, attracting and converting a new audience takes time, commitment and investment. You need to meet an exact need at the right time with the right solution at the right price, better than your competition. You may also need to overcome competitors that have existing relationships with your target audience.

Once you have generated interest, you need to be ready with materials to support the customer engagement and conversion process. Some customers are fine with PDFs others prefer printed glossy packs for the board to peruse, along with detailed product descriptions and a professional proposal.

Winning the first deal is crucial and when all goes well can be an excellent springboard to winning further business in the same market.

Adding new products and services to your portfolio often starts with a single opportunity. Every element of supplier services and support is tested from the time it took to answer the first enquiry, to the quality of the post-sales support. Where suppliers exceed expectations and deals are won to the satisfaction of both the partner and the end customer, motivation to find similar opportunities is high. Where demand in the base is also high, companies are more likely to consider productising solutions and dedicating resource to growing new revenue streams. Good support at every stage is vital to closing the first deal. What support does Jola offer for each partner model?

Support for dealers

Dealers use our website and branded materials (flyers, guides, videos) to market and sell solutions. Jola’s Partner Managers are available to attend meetings and conference calls as required and dealers have access to a quoting and ordering tool, which allows them to create co-branded sales proposals and email them directly to the customer. Customers can review and edit proposals and when they are they ready, they can simply click to order, which automatically triggers provisioning actions internally.

Support for resellers

Resellers have typically sold similar solutions and have a view of the potential demand. They usually understand pricing models and know what their buy price needs to be, to protect margins and be competitive. These companies may already have a web site, marketing collateral and defined terms and conditions. They tend to use our product overviews, feature summaries and competitive comparison documents, available in word, to shape their own proposition. They have their own brands, a good knowledge of their competition and their own unique selling points. They like to bundle solutions to include their own service wraps, tailored to meet the specific needs of their target sector. Once their pricing is set and products have been added to the website, they use our white label product flyers and guides to create branded versions for their sales and support teams.

IoT describes the networking of devices that can collect or transmit information. The data amassed from these devices can then be analysed to optimize products, services, and operations. The market is anticipating big things from IoT in the next few years, however today, according to Cisco, three quarters of IoT initiatives fail.

The IoT opportunity

By 2020 Cisco predict there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide. Demand for the first generation of IoT products (fitness bands, smart watches, and smart thermostats) will increase as component technologies evolve and their costs decline. 

Companies, such as Jola, have developed Mobile Manager to manage large estates of 4G data SIMs in remote devices. The portal communicates in real-time with Vodafone and O2 4G networks and can be used by both resellers and their end users. Mobile Manager handles SIM activations, ceases, suspensions, reports, alerts and bolt-ons. 

In IT and Telecoms, SMEs are looking for ways to connect an increasing number of devices, (laptops, tablets, smartphones, cameras) in multiple locations to the internet on short-term contracts. 4G is widely available and fast. The range of 4G MiFi/WiFi routers is extensive and reasonably priced, however the challenge of how to manage usage and potential bill shock remains.

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.