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There’s little doubt that the chan-
nel partner landscape is in a state
of flux, in terms of both technology
and the sales process. Recognizing
this, BullsEye Telecom is focusing on
differentiating itself and its partners
in the increasingly crowed hosted
VoIP and UCaaS arena. To do so,
BullsEye is emphasizing high-touch
customer service, including hands-
on, personal installations.
“We differentiate on 17 years of
experience,” explained Tim Basa,
executive vice president of sales
and marketing at BullsEye. “A lot
of companies do self-installs. They
want you to download the software
and watch a couple of videos, and
you’re on your own. Our client ser-
vices team is there to help clients
and channel partners execute on
what they’re selling. With all these
services available across all devices,
we’ve focused on how to make that
experience great – and on how we
product-manage and focus and re-
ally make the client experience spe-
cial for them.”
The company also has continued
to expand its channel management
team, with more hires on the way,
and has added a success center in
Boston. Partners can come in for
training, but also to do customer
conference calls with BullsEye sup-
port or to bring clients in to meet with
sales engineers.
The move is indicative of how
the channel process is evolving for
BullsEye.
“We certainly use more video and
conference calls than ever before,
but the thing that we do in the chan-
nel that seems to be the most effec-
tive is more face time, whether that’s
running appointments in the field,
being on site, working with partners’
sales, business development and
solutions engineering teams or inter-
acting with prospects,” Basa said.
He added, “With all that technol-
ogy available, the thing that our part-
ners love is being able to call an ac-
count manager to, say, run a report
for them. A live friendly voice takes
their calls and someone helps them,
whatever they need.”
This high-touch approach is
especially important given how com-
plex the landscape has become as
technology use shifts.
“Phones are coming off the desks,
and mobile and softphones are the
norm – we’re not dealing with a lot of
chunks of black plastic on the desks.
And that has created a lot of noise for
partners,” said Basa. “How do you get
time on the calendar? If someone has
a workflow or communications tool,
you have to convince them that you
have what meets their need.”
Accordingly, the sales process
has certainly evolved, Basa noted.
“You used to be able to one-call
close someone on long-distance us-
ing savings and fear, uncertainty and
doubt – old-school sales methods.
For the large part, those just don’t
work anymore.”
BullsEye has developed what
it calls a “big account sales accel-
erator,” a disciplined process that
involves educating end users and
then sticking with them. The idea
is that partners have to nurture the
relationship with the customer, offer-
ing opportunities to purchase differ-
ent solutions at different times with
different plans and rate structures,
depending on the context – and they
must be ready to tailor something to
fit specific business needs.
“Partners must be patient and
involve more buyers within the com-
pany,” Basa said. “The focus used
to be on finding a decision-maker,
but that’s a group of people now, so
the sales process addresses many
different specific job functions. The
accounts payable department has
a different need than the regional
manager in the field, but you have to
make them all comfortable.”
BullsEye has continued to add
more feature functionality to its
VoIP platform, as well, and can
customize it for the needs of clients,
including applying the technology
in inventive ways. For instance,
consider its contact center platform
that’s built to manage hundreds of
people in a room answering phones.
The company has been able to
implement that same technology
for multi-location businesses that
have four or five phones per site.
In one restaurant example, an Ital-
ian restaurant with seven locations,
the analytics package allowed the
end user to see peak times of day
for carryout, or whether employees
were not answering the phone at 9
p.m. on Saturdays because they’re
high school kids that want to leave
to meet their friends.
On the other hand, Basa noted
that sometimes the oldest products
in the portfolio – POTs and broad-
band – still offer the best path into
an account.
“Because there’s so much noise
around network and cloud services,
partners forget there’s a big opportu-
nity with consolidating analog POTS
lines and things like auto-attendant,”
Basa said. “As crazy as it sounds,
sometimes that simple product, as
unglamorous as it is, is a way to
open up a new revenue stream and
build trust on the telephony side.
From there you can create a road-
map to VoIP. Partners don’t need to
ram the hosted product down a cli-
ent’s throat immediately.”
BullsEye Goes High-Touch
By
Tara
Seals
PROFILE
80
CHANNEL
VISION
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July - August 2016