Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

1. Know your true value

What are your strengths and your real competitive advantage? Do you have a product that is not only unique but for which there is also a demand? Are you the lowest cost provider or do you add value through the expertise of your sales and pre-sales support. So many suppliers to the channel kid themselves they can charge a premium because of their service wrap and the quality of their salespeople. In actual fact the resellers they serve would outsell any of the ‘experts’ their suppliers put up as their ‘value-add’ and few would put them in front of their customers. If you are offering leads to your channel Partners then don’t over-promise and if you also operate a direct channel then know that this will raise concerns and address them head-on. 

There are over 5000 scaffolding companies registered in the UK employing over 30,000 people according to IBISWorld’s Scaffolding Services market research report, conducted in December last year. The report suggests market revenues of over £3bn with no companies having a dominent market share. Why are so many switching to hosted voice?

Local IT Support

Many local IT support companies supply cabling and PC support to local SMEs. Typically with several hundred customers, they operate within a couple of hours drive of the office but will go farther afield if required and for the right size job. A lot of their income comes from one-off projects however they have a reasonable base of customers that pay monthly to support their office IT.  Monthly recurring revenues help to grow the business and cover costs between projects.

1. We only offer SIM-only packages.

Jola has the best deal on Vodafone mobile SIMs neatly packaged - RegularSIM, LargeSIM and SuperSIM. We offer unlimited standard UK minutes, unlimited texts and 20GB of 4G data as well as inclusive minutes to non-geographic numbers. We partner with IT support and telecommunications companies with customers looing to break the tethering of airtime and handset contracts.

Fibre broadband is faster than copper broadband but is that the only benefit for your customers?

Access to hosted apps - work remotely as if in the office

Remote workers upgrading to fibre broadband can access useful business applications hosted in the cloud, such as Microsoft Office 365, JolaPhone cloud voice and Xero online accountancy packages. The benefit here is that they can work from home as if they were in the office, making and receiving calls and accessing, editing and saving corporate documents. Team members in the office can even see if their colleagues working from home are online or on the phone before making contact.

There are over 20,000 nursing homes in the UK providing residential care to older people, with an average of 40 residents per home. Qualified nurses provide care to residents, some of whom are eligible for NHS funding with the rest being privately funded.

Quality of care is a primary focus and some nursing homes are introducing IT to help improve communication.

One of Jola's Partners recently installed fibre broadband into a nursing home with four sites in Reading. They replaced the existing phone lines and installed four phones into each site. They also provided staff with tablets loaded with appropriate software to log medical notes. The care homes are now all on one phone system and key nursing staff use their mobiles as a desk extension to make and receive calls on the go.

1. Why upgrade your customers' connectivity?

You are trusted advisers - your customers prefer to buy from you. If you also manage their connectivity you can keep your competitors out and use the faster, more reliable connection to move applications and data into the cloud. You can also increase your recurring revenues, helping you to fund business growth.

Have you ever had a customer ring you up in a panic needing a phone system double quick?

It happens more often that you might think. Moving offices can be as stressful as moving house and with so much to think about telephony often falls through the cracks. Growing businesses with new starters and nowhere to seat them, often need to find premises quickly and be up and running in days. 

A recent SIR report revealed that in the majority of cases SMEs are asking their IT support company for advice when considering hosted solutions. This is probably because after a voice reseller supplies a PBX they often have little to do with the SME except to supply new handsets and fix the occasional issue. The data company on the other hand is often ‘embedded’ with their customers; patching servers, installing software and supporting their desktop hardware and applications. Most SMEs would not dare run anything (like hosted telephony) over their LAN without first consulting with their IT support company. Another channel to watch out for is mobile. These guys often have thousands of SME end users and, in a saturated and competitive market, they are keen to find something else to sell them. With teams of well trained and hungry sales people and with no legacy base of ‘tin’ to protect they are quickly building large bases of hosted telephony seats.

This question was recently asked on a panel at Convergence Summit South. Most of the panellists (four of which had Broadsoft platforms) talked about features and pricing. The resulting questions from an audience of mostly resellers made it clear that the panellists had only further confused them. If resellers and dealers are having problems differentiating between offerings then maybe its no wonder that a recent market report shows 60% of SMEs are too.

Research last year from SIR indicated that the majority of SMEs sought advice from a trusted supplier before buying business communications solutions. Further, they will usually research the web and get a quote from a well known carrier (often BT) before they end up buying from an existing supplier. It is very rare for a reseller to be competing against other resellers in the 10-100 employee market and when it happens the incumbent usually wins (unless they have messed up the relationship).