Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

When setting up the marketing department at Jola, I had some decisions to make around suppliers I would use, which would help me to shape and grow the business. As a start-up company back then, I was looking for feature-rich solutions on a very competitive, pay-per-month basis, with no upfront investment. I made a list of the software and services I would need and went online to research potential suppliers.

Trusted suppliers

I started with companies that I had used in the past. Companies with robust solutions I had tried and tested with Account Managers I could pick up the phone to. I updated myself with the latest bells and whistles and checked them against current and potential future requirements.

Recommended suppliers

I then looked at recommended suppliers other trusted marketing professionals and co-workers had used in the past. I collated new information, compared pricing and had a demo of their platforms.

Market leaders

In case I was missing I trick, I looked to the market leaders for inspiration. What did they have that may work for me and how did they compare pricewise?

There are so many useful group applications on the market designed to help improve business communications. Office UC allows you to work from any location, with an internet connection, see who is available and send instant messages as well as make phone calls. It is now common place to see a team IM or WhatsApp group, used in combination with emails, phone calls and face to face meetings. They offer a wide range of benefits to business users and a few draw backs. When thinking about implementing a new app within your organisation, it is useful to consider the following:

Purpose

What are you planning to use it for? If it is not clear what the group was set up for, employees may not want to use it. Outlining the purpose of the group, and communicating the group members will help the tool to remain effective. Using a group chat to share solutions to problems and share knowledge, is an excellent way to gather data. This information could be taken and added to processes or shared with customers via an FAQ.

Rules

Define appropriate content. Employees need to know the rules to feel comfortable using a new tool, especially when senior management are included. Don’t be tempted to limit social content, as relationship building can often lead to better teamwork and sharing of information. Adding social channels to the general business communications policy, will often cover this.

What you need to know

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and true SEO is ethical, organic and takes time. SEO is a long-term strategy which can produce higher rankings and increased traffic to your website.

Search engines want to provide the best possible result to a key word search. Companies wanting to be found, need to create quality content that matches relevant search terms.

Page 1

Research indicates that 91% of searchers do not go past page 1 of the search results. Try a search containing your company name and see where you rank. If it is not on page 1, there is work to be done.

Adwords

Adwords is a viable option for being seen in Google. The problem is that Adwords can be expensive and their long-term value is questionable. As soon as you stop paying for Adwords, your result will no longer be seen.

Organic Search

In organic search, you don’t have to continually pay to be seen and once you have reached the first page of Google you can often stay there for a long period of time depending on the amount of competition.

Choose your partnerships carefully

Crafting the right relationships with suppliers is very important, as it can have a significant impact on your business. Companies have been put off selling connectivity, hosted voice and mobile from bad experiences with suppliers in the past. It is important to do your research, review contract terms and contact references, to try to avoid engaging with the wrong suppliers.

Don’t try to do everything yourself

It is tempting as a business owner to do it all yourself. Negotiate the contract, participate in product and portal training, plan the marketing campaign and sell, as well as running the billing and taking all the support calls. By recruiting and training the right people, you will have more time to focus on helping the business grow. If you can outsource functions that are not core to your business then consider doing so. Some of your suppliers will offer white label installation, support and billing options you can use until it is more economical to bring it in-house. 

It’s continuous

Marketing, just like sales, is a continuous process. Whether you are a one-man band or a multi-million-pound organisation, you are always promoting your company with a view to winning new business.

Jola partners, looking for marketing support, are often thinking about a single campaign to promote a new product. Those that view marketing as part of their continuous sales strategy are often more successful. These partners update their website, add to their proposal templates and create new support documentation. Their sales teams are trained and sell new services alongside core services.

It helps to build relationships

Building relationships in marketing is just as important as in sales. Partners often approach Jola with a new database and are hoping for copy to instantly generate leads. Unless they first build the relationship, marketing is likely to have a similar hit rate as sales would cold calling. By researching the list to understand who you are talking to, what existing solutions they have, any issues and alternative solutions etc. you can tailor your messaging and improve your hit rate.

Marketing helps to build relationships by making an introduction, who you are, services you provide and how you can help to meet an existing requirement. Marketing campaigns need to grab attention, generate interest, desire and provoke an action for sales to follow up.

When choosing a new supplier there are few things that are expected, good quality products, excellent pricing, great portals and good support. Most suppliers advertise these elements, however few single out customer service as a differentiator. Companies like Rackspace tend to be the exception rather than the rule, advertising fanatical support as an ethos.

Does a track record for great customer service influence your decision?

When you are looking for a new supplier do you ask for references or service statistics? The companies I spoke to at a recent channel event don’t. The feedback I gathered was that decisions had been made on price. This was to ensure the end user had their requirements met at the right price with enough margin for the reseller. Companies were prepared to accept lower levels of service for the products at the price point they needed, until they felt their business was no longer valued and other suppliers could offer a competitive alternative. Companies that had been burnt by poor service delivery in the past, were much more interested in support available.

Research from Forrester’s

A recent report by Forrester’s stated that 71% of companies felt that valuing their time was the most important thing a supplier can do to provide them with a good service. This seems to work in the channel, with companies demanding high-quality, self-service portals to manage quoting, ordering and provisioning of services directly. End users are often on the phone demanding answers and partners don’t want to wait for third party answers.

73% of companies said that voice was the most important communications channel with web self-service, web chat, social media and email closely behind. Many channel suppliers have support portals, videos and guides, which often can be re-branded for partners to send to their end users to manage changes themselves. Most have ticketing systems they respond to within SLA and some suppliers are using social media to communicate with customers.

You may have built or acquired a base of telecoms or connectivity customers. This may not be a core part of your business and the cost of supporting and billing these customers may be on the increase. What do you do? You could invest in this part of your business or sell it.

Why sell?

• You may simply want to raise some cash, either to expand the business in other areas or for personal reasons
• You may not have reached critical mass. A lot of data resellers get into telecoms by accident and then realise the cost of billing and support is depressing margins. Companies with bigger bases can buy better and you risk losing customers when their contracts come up for renewal.
• The trend in the cost of communications is down. For example, at the end of a three-year leased line contract you may be able to renew with the customer at the same percentage margin but your cash margin could be halved, whilst your cost to support this customer has remained the same, or increased.

What are the challenges if you do decide to sell?

• You may be too small for a broker, who traditionally looks to sell larger businesses.
• You may not know who else to approach.
• You may have been approached by a competitor and are reluctant to put your core business at risk by selling to them

In the last year or so, several suppliers have been either overtly or covertly shutting down their wholesale partner divisions. Overtly by disbanding their wholesale sales teams or covertly by refusing to take on new partners and encouraging direct sales staff to compete with their channel partners.

Why are some companies dipping in and out of the channel?

New ownership

When a company is taken over or receives significant new investment, new management find it hard to see passed the headline numbers. The comment, “If I can make three times the margin direct, why would I sell wholesale?” is common and a knee-jerk reaction is to pull out of channel. Often when sales don’t increase and their true cost-of-sale is calculated, the company will try to re-engage with resellers.

Wrong approach

Selling through partners requires a particular set of skills and the proper alignment of the organisation. Suppliers that are not channel-only have to work particularly hard to build trust and differentiate themselves. A common error is to view the reseller as the customer, forgetting they have to sell and support the products and services with hundreds or thousands of end user businesses. Resellers need reliable infrastructure and a consistent and timely flow of information. Suppliers need to make themselves easy-to-do-business-with by developing self-service ordering, provisioning and management portals.

Negotiation 101 – back to basics

I thought it might be useful to distil all the thousands of pages on negotiation available on the web, down to three important principles. Overarching all of these, is preparation. People who think they can walk into a negotiation and wing-it, relying on their wits and the benevolence of their opposite number, leave money on the table or undermine the chance of agreement altogether. 

Interest vs Position

The easiest way to explain this is by example. Reseller A goes into a negotiation with Supplier B. Reseller A’s position is that they want to buy product C for £10, which is below the £16 price they have been given by supplier B - £16 is the supplier’s position. The rookie negotiator immediately starts haggling over price whereas the veteran will always start with interests. The interest of the reseller is that they know what they need to sell for to win business at a reasonable margin. For this they need to buy at £10. The interest of the supplier is that they load extra features into product C that most of their competitors don’t offer – they can’t afford to sell much below £16. Do reseller A’s customers need supplier B’s extra features? If so, what could reseller A charge for them. If not, can supplier B offer reseller A, a stripped-down version of the product? Initial questions like “why is your target price £10?” and “what is included in your £16 price” are more productive than just throwing numbers around. Ask questions and avoid confrontation.

What is the balance of power?

This is important when you consider what happens if you cannot come to an agreement. Who suffers the most? What is your next best alternative and what is theirs. Take the example above, who has the power? You might think it is reseller A because they have many suppliers to choose from. What you won’t know, unless you ask questions and think through the answers, is that reseller A already buys most of their products from supplier B. The MD has been told by the CTO that the billing system cannot handle multiple CDRs and would need upgrading if they don’t buy product C from supplier B. Also at a certain level of spend reseller A gets a discount on everything they buy from supplier B. Supplier B would like reseller A’s business but the person they are negotiating with is a middle manager with no equity stake in supplier B and no sales target. To them it’s just a job and if they walk away from the deal there are no consequences. However, if they approve a deal below minimum margin they will be required to get permission and account for their decision. You must understand the balance of power before you start negotiating, so do your research and ask questions. Don’t be afraid to insist on negotiating with the decision maker.

There isn’t a single supplier in the UK voice and data industry that owns and operates 100% of the infrastructure on which their products and services depend. The emergence of the cloud has encouraged many centres of excellence to flourish and interconnect. This enables channel suppliers like Jola to knit best-of-breed suppliers together with software and service wraps to match the needs of our resellers and dealers. However, this approach brings with it unique challenges in support and incident management.

How quickly are you notified?

Should an incident occur, you need to know what the problem is and how long it will take to be fixed. You want to be on the front foot, pro-actively contacting your customers with detailed communications regarding the incident. If all suppliers in the chain do not have a well thought-through incident management process, a wave of dissatisfied end-user customers will quickly build, with the last reseller in the chain taking the brunt of the criticism. Organisations not used to dealing with the channel may not understand the imperative for fast, accurate information. Those that are not channel-only will often prioritise their direct customers over their channel partners.

How should it be done?

Ideally incidents are categorised by priority. We use the UTIL guidelines categorising incidents by impact and urgency, P1, P2 etc. Suppliers need to get the initial communication out to customers within the first 30 minutes (we aim for 15) explaining the issue. It is important to have clear communication between the engineers working on the problem and the support team managing calls and communications. Updates need to be at least hourly. Communication paths need to be established in advance between suppliers and departments for effective updates.