Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

How to generate leads for hosted voice and internet connectivity

Getting started

You have signed up with a supplier such as Jola for hosted voice solutions. What next?

Step 1

Add the new products and services to your website. List them under products, provide an overview of the services and if appropriate add a download to further information. Think about key words and phrases in your web content. Contact your supplier for help with text and graphics. Ensure you have a data capture box so that interested parties can submit their details for further information. Forward these leads to your sales team for immediate follow up.

1. Do you want a hosted or traditional business telephone system?

Technology savvy customers will already be considering the benefits of hosted telephony over a traditional phone system. To make your decision consider the following:

Reliability - you need to be able to make and receive calls during business hours with no issues. Research the underlying technology, the uptime guarantees and disaster recovery options. Some hosted solutions allow you to use mobile devices as desktop phones and make and forward calls remotely to ensure business continuity.

According to Market Monitor the market for cloud computing services such as cloud voice will grow at a rate of 36% every year and revenues will be just shy of £12.7bn by 2016. A large percentage of this growth is coming from SMEs being driven by a number of different factors:

Are your customers being held back by poor performance or poor reliability of their broadband?

Low bandwidth, high latency and packet loss can cause many applications such as voice over IP (VOIP) and video conferencing to be unusable. Customers that have checked only with BT often feel that there is nothing to be done.

Few people realise that BT Openreach don’t supply a broadband or leased line service directly to end users. Their customers are service providers that use them for the ‘last mile’ of connectivity services they sell.  

1. Acceptance of the concept

Before IP voice was commercially viable, millions of US SMEs were already using Centrex. In the early 1980s the US telecommunications market liberalised, creating 7 local operating companies (the equivalent of Openreach) nicknamed ‘Baby bells’. These all launched their own central exchange offerings (Centrex) in preference to on-premise telephone equipment. With a big stake in the equipment market, BT was never really interested in Centrex and the UK’s first Centrex product launched by Mercury in the early 1990s was clumsy, unreliable and expensive.

1. Reliable connectivity is cheaper

The biggest barrier to cloud-based telephone systems has been broadband because voice traffic is intolerant to varying speeds and congestion. This issue, coupled with the ‘best-effort’ nature of broadband technologies, has given hosted voice a bad start and a bad name. Now that companies can buy fibre broadband and a dedicated 20Mb leased line for £199 per month they are starting to use it.

1 - Your customers want faster broadband - why not get it from you?

The first company to deliver internet connectivity into a business will often retain that customer as they upgrade their connectivity and move into hosted applications. If you are a business supporting SMEs, internet connectivity is a great first product and a good platform to upsell additional services from.

Investment in IT hardware and software reaches a record high but SMEs struggle with complexity

A new survey by BNP Paribas reports that business investment in IT hardware and software has hit a record high, up by a quarter since the start of the 2008 financial crisis. The report says that business investment in information and communications technology jumped to £34.4 billion last year – up by 24% since the height of the recession in 2009, when businesses’ IT capital spending was just £27.6bn. 

As the amount of voice traffic carried over the Internet increases, we are seeing both pros and cons to moving to a converged data network in the SME market, but will this affect SME suppliers such as IT support services and business telecommunications providers?

In the mid-1980s the government broke British Telecomm's monopoly and suddenly anyone could sell telephone systems to businesses.

Although some companies started up specifically to sell telecommunications most of the new suppliers of phone systems already sold office equipment (fax, copiers, furniture) and had decided to diversify. To a lesser extent IT Support companies also added telecommunications to their portfolios but they were more service-orientated than equipment and early set-backs with these products often put them off. When the market for telephone calls liberalised later in the decade the channel was really born and thousands of small local companies started supplying calls and lines as well as telephone systems. Some of the large indepedent telecommunications companies we see today e.g. Daisy, Alternative, Kcom were only made possible by the actions of the government.