By Allister Quinteros In my sales experience, you need to win the use case to differentiate yourself from your competitors and win the cloud communications sale. But how? A good chunk of end users is still fine with simple hosted PBX functions for many of their endpoints. So how do you create differentiation? If you are a dedicated reader of this publication, like I am, you will know that the answer lies in CCaaS and – most importantly – how a business can use it to achieve their desired outcomes. I recall a conversation in which an IT decision-maker asked if we can support a particular brand/model of IP handsets and provide simple voice and IP services all over the U.S. and Canada for 600-plus end points and more than 100 locations. I said, “Of course we could,” knowing that my carrier partner can easily fulfill these connectivity needs. He replied, “Great! Now I need you to meet our customer service leaders who have very particular IVR routing and reporting needs.” The $1.08 million ARR sale was predicated on the $180,000 ARR CCaaS. This was an educational institution and the critical problem it was solving centered on routing calls from parents quickly and correctly. Rather than provide a generic demo of our IVR capabilities, our team took the time to really understand their use case. We dug into their use case during a discovery session, where we uncovered more workflow and customer service needs, a few technical gaps and some wish lists for the future. This prepared us to deliver a demo catered to their needs. There were 12 leaders on the initial demo and the follow up demos. We had meetings separately between IT (for the PBX and connectivity piece) and the business users (staff workflows, customer interaction mapping and reporting, on both). Ultimately, once we won the business users, the business agreed to terms, and they are still a customer to this day. Along these lines, here are some steps and tips explaining how you, the seller, can “win the endorsement of the business user.” Start with your best relationships More than likely, your primary customer contacts are the IT leaders. They can be a great resource for getting you to the business user. Ask your IT contacts how they “service the AT YOUR SERVICE: XaaS Down to Business (Case) 52 CHANNELVISION | MARCH - APRIL 2024 Strategies to win the UCaaS & CCaaS sale
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