Differentiation – The Holy Grail
Leaving aside price, how
34 | IP Telephony 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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In a sea of products which appear to do the same thing how can partners differentiate themselves enough to
make themselves stand out? Is service and support the holy grail?
can partners di erentiate
themselves enough to
make themselves stand
out? Some say that providing
an excellent service and support
wrap is one solution and will
become the battle eld partners
need to focus on to make their
o ering stand out in the crowd.
Myles Leach Managing
Director at NFON UK, says
the partners that have been
the most successful with are
the ones that understand that
NFON is a disrupter.
“To deliver their solutions
as far and wide as possible,
NFON concentrates on going
out to partners and working
with them to support their end
users. As a more agile business,
NFON is in an excellent
place to be an innovative
disrupter in the eld of business
communication, and the
company also sees opportunities
to partner with organisations
outside of the traditional UC
space too, including IT service
providers and resellers.
NFON already gets a lot
of positive feedback from its
partners for the disruptive
experiences that they o er,
and the business wants to keep
building on this growth going
forward. We want to increase
our sales channel, but we don’t
want to oversaturate it and
give our partners too much
competition in the same areas.
NFON o ers a wide variety
of businesses the opportunity
to get involved with cloud
telephony with all features
and advantages, rather than
focusing exclusively on
traditional UC providers. e
classic communications resellers
often struggle when it comes
to getting their heads around
the agility of the new cloud
environment. However, a lot of
smaller brands and IT partners
resellers can easily integrate
this new o ering into their
product portfolio. e fact
is, resellers go for the strategy
that’s easy, and NFON is trying
to give them that. We’re doing
commission sales, Wholesale,
and more, which means that we
can give partners whatever they
need. NFON is even exploring
the possibilities of the master
agent model, by taking over
billing and other tasks that their
partners don’t want to deal with
on their behalf.”
Graham Wilkinson at
Beyond Connectivity says that
his company covers all bases for
a reseller such as bureau billing
and many other services –
backed by an organisation with
a pedigree, extensive support
and account management.
“Hosted can be viewed
as an ordinary ‘one size ts
all’ solution but the Beyond
platform encapsulates so much
more and is based on a single
pane of glass management
console and a self-serve portal.
Enhanced unlimited call
recording options ensure PCI
and MiFID II compliance
whilst an analytics wall
board generates live call stats
information.
It is always best to sell a
service rather than a price point.
Service and support is a key
di erentiator but amazingly not
everyone seems to care – until
there is a problem. Often not
enough weight is given to this
element and it needs to be a key
aspect of the solution, but it is
also only one component of the
full package.”
Peter Oosthuizen, London
Partner Sales Manager for
Spit re makes the case for price
and feature di erentiation.
“Our partners emphasise
both the reliability of the
Spit re Hosted PBX 2.1 and
the consistent call quality when
delivered over Spit re’s own
voice approved broadband or
Ethernet circuits backed up
with SLAs. Because of our
expertise in IP engineering we
can always support our partners
to deliver the best SIP solution
for their customers’ needs.
As Spit re Hosted PBX 2.1
has been developed in house,
we are able to o er the service
at the highly competitive rate
of only £6 per user license a
month, including free service
setup on one-year contracts.
e minimum contract period
is three months and customers
can opt to manage their own
setup. is builds the allimportant
price di erentiator
into the package.
e Holy Grail for channel
partners is a supplier with the full
package. Service and support,
functionality and price.”
Is the service wrap the Holy Grail of differentiation?
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