PRICE VS.
FEATURES
It all comes down to money
Dealing with prospects who
How do partners sell on feature sets and functionality when so many customers are price driven? How do you
push customers out of the ‘price-fi rst’ mentality so they focus on the bigger picture?
only seem to be making
nal decisions on price can
be frustrating. ere are a
million ways you want to answer
their question, “Why should I
buy your product instead of your
competitor’s?” but the only one
they want to hear is “Our product
will cost you less.”
On top of this, you can be
sure that your prospect has
been researching your product
online and thinks he or she
knows everything and believes
that price is the only remaining
di erentiator.
A key factor today is to
sell a value-added solution
which di erentiates you from
competitors so you are not just in
a race to the bottom on price.
Dave Reynolds,Managing
Director at XelionUK, says that
rst generation UK hosted voice
services provide a very closed
environment where they and not
the reseller have the control and
dictate the end product.
“Xelion is not a ‘me-too’
product which is why Xelion
7 has RESTful APIs allowing
third-party to be easily integrated
seamlessly with the service. is
allows our partners the freedom
to design bespoke solutions for
customers with best of breed
apps that really meet their
requirements, instead of a ‘onesize
ts-all’ service. By adding
value our partners generate
pro t.”
According to Dominic
Horton of Spit re, any solution
will o er its own balance of
price and features but it is also
important to add quality into
that equation.
“A feature rich telephony
system with poor quality will
only cause headaches. However
when the service is built properly
there should be no need to
compromise on quality when
looking for a lower cost solution.
Spit re understands that a one
size ts all approach will always
struggle to meet the needs of
every customer. Instead we o er
a range of products and services
to ensure the solution more
closely matches the customer
requirement.
For those who are cost
conscious but still require a
feature rich telephony solution
without compromising on quality
we have built Hosted PBX 2.1.
Not only does Hosted PBX 2.1
deliver all the features you would
expect from a cloud based PBX
but as it bene ts from Spit re’s
expertise and dedicated voice
network voice quality is assured
at all times.
Hosted PBX 2.1 is still
however an incredibly feature
rich system, with everything
available out of the box. is
provides expected standard PBX
features such as call routing/autoattendant/
voicemail/conference
calls all the way up to soft phone
functionality and a sophisticated
web based management console.
e bigger picture with this is
that our partners are empowered
to make a lot of the changes
to their end user’s system
themselves– leading to a more
streamlined experience.”
When it comes to adding
value Horton points out that a
business requiring connectivity
to support 15 voice calls needs
less than 2Mb of bandwidth,
but the end-to-end handset-tohandset
data journey has to be
high quality with less than 1%
packet loss, 150ms latency and
30ms jitter.
“Latency is added by each
device, circuit or cable that the
voice packet passes through on its
end-to-end journey, so the latency
of the WAN circuit must be
signi cantly less than 150ms. All
Spit re voice approved broadband
and ethernet circuits therefore
o er SLA backed guarantees on
these performance characteristics,
with an absolute maximum circuit
latency of 80ms.”
Reseller Viewpoint
“For a basic phone system it’s
hard to sell on features and
bene ts,” says Nathan Hill-
Haines, Managing Director at
reseller Amvia.
“ e buyer’s assumption is ‘I’ll
be able to talk and get messages’,
however, getting the right data
service, switch and ultimately
solution is where it’s possible to
package value.
It is very di cult to sell
features to people who at the
core just want to make calls,
transfer calls and receive
voicemail messages. Yes, there
are customers with more
sophisticated collaboration or
contact centre requirements,
but with the swathing majority
viewing a standard phone system
as a commodity product, ‘price
rst’ will usually be the main
concern.”
32 | IP Telephony 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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