EVENTS Round Table: Wildix
“You should be able to sit there and say you can have an impact on Customer Experience, drive efficiencies in
the business and have a track record of doing this.” Neil Hollands, Owner of Concert Networks
Under Pressure in Hosted?
Comms Business recently hosted a round table, supported by Wildix, with key industry players to talk about
some of the challenges facing the market today. Price pressure in hosted, end of the ISDN and WebRTC
strategy were the topics of the day
Comms Business Magazine
(CBM): How are you dealing
with price pressure in the
hosted telephony market?
Ian Walker, Director at Fifteen
Group (IW): If you are just
providing a phone and a hosted
seat I think it is ultimately just
a race to the bottom. You have
to be asking your customers
the right questions. What are
you issues? Your pains? You
need to ask question after
question. We don’t want to be
having this race to the bottom,
ultimately if you are pitching
to customers they are likely to
have a couple from Horizon
(Gamma), which is essentially
the same solution, so we try
and add a bit around that. We
still have on-site solutions with
NEC, using SIP trunks, and
it is a unique oering to have
because businesses still have
that ability to have IP phones
working, sometimes they are
more exible and easier to use
than a hosted solutions etc.
Sometimes we pitch that and
ask the questions, knowing full
well the customer or prospect
will have a number of hosted
solutions on the table.
Take a reasonably sized
academy school where they
use very little in the way of
external communication
and it’s all about internal
communication. ey might
have to pay somewhere in the
region of £10 per seat for 60
extensions, when the majority
are in classrooms. We can come
in with a basic on-site solution,
if they have multiple sites we
can link them up together too.
We are nding that coming in
at a dierent angle is how we
are battling against the hosted
players. Ideally, it’s a solution
sale and we might be the only
one that comes in with an onsite
solution which may be old
fashioned, but it still works and
is cost eective on a long lease.
Neil Hollands, Owner of
Concert Networks (NH): We
need to focus on the impact of
what we are delivering to the
customer. e applications we
are providing and what benet
that is providing. If we are
sitting there talking about tech
and the features people will
just see the same thing. Most
likely a couple of Horizon
resellers, some Broadsofts etc…
they are all the same then it
becomes ‘who is going to sell
it the cheapest?’ You should
be able to sit there and say
you can have an impact on
Customer Experience, drive
eciencies in the business and
have a track record of doing
this. If there is a genuine desire
to have that in the business
then that is what they are
buying. If you are selling that
at 20% above the lowest price
of a Gamma reseller, as long
as you have maintained that
message all the way through
the sales process, you should be
able to maintain your margin
more often than not.
IW: We often walk away from
deals because the customer is
just looking when they come
out of a contract, they want
to keep the handsets and just
want the lowest price. We
often know we are onto a loser
straight away, so we ask them
the questions about what they
are trying to achieve etc. If
they come back and it is just
about price, we’ll walk away.
Lee Raper, Director at Linkup
Comms & Data (LR): What
about people that have three
ISDN channels coming in,
they might have 6 lines but
40 extensions. How do you go
about convincing them to go
to hosted where they have got
to get those seats at £10 apiece
when they were only paying
a small amount for what they
have already?
We came across a BT
Ambassador the other day and
the customer just won’t change
it. e phone works, he has
two analogue lines coming in
and 4 extensions. I keep telling
him he has to change it at some
point! Where is that tipping
point, that price point where
they will move? To sell them
10 hosted seats at good margin,
42 | Comms Business Magazine | April 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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