Strategies to win the UCaaS & CCaaS sale
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 could 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 business.” In the first conversation I ever had with partner and channel consultant Peter Radizeski, I told him what I do (CCaaS overlay for carriers) and asked him for some advice. Peter said, verbatim, “Ask your carrier seller to ask their IT contact who is responsible for the IVR problem. Believe me, it is a problem.”
The IVR is the active ingredient in the CCaaS solution; it drives the ACD, reporting, CRM integration, routing, dashboards, etc. The “problem” will relate to some sort of gap in either the staff workflow, the management experience or the customer experience. Of course, the problem will be the communications platform, not the business staff or the management. Once you asked about what workflow, management experience or customer experience challenges the business has, ask, “Who manages this effort?” There is your hook for the business user. Ask your IT contact to broker an introduction or walk you in for the critical “discovery call.”
An Effective Discovery Call
A director of sales engineering at one of Intermedia’s carrier partners recently told me, “The voice sale is won at the discovery phase.” I agree. The reason why the prospect is entering the buying cycle is because of three to six critical use cases that are negatively affecting their workflow, customer experience or management experience. Leverage your vendor as much as you can at this stage if your sales engineers are new or lack experience in talking with business users. This is not a session to play “Go Fish,” where they ask for features, and you say, “yes or no.” This is about diving into the root of problems they are solving for. Use the SPIN methodology when asking questions:
- Situation: Ask the business user about their current situation or state of the business. Ask questions about their background and get more context.
- Problem: Ask questions that help you find out where the problem lies; is it their workflows, customer experience or management experience?
- Implication: Ask how these problems impact their business. Ask them what would happen if these problems went unresolved. Ideally, they can point to a dollar figure or some other metric.
- Need-Payoff: Ask the customer what they feel they need to solve the problem. This is where you can hint at how you can solve the problem.
The best advice for preparing for the discovery call is a thorough read of their website: Contact Us; About Us; Executive Summary of their Annual/Quarterly Reports; calling their numbers to experience their interaction; viewing job descriptions will tell you what CRM’s they are using, etc. You want to be educated in their company/industry jargon and their main lines of business. Their website and LinkedIn profiles will tell you a lot. This will differentiate you from other sellers since you took the time to understand their business and prepare for the call. Once you have their three to six critical uses cases (i.e, problems they are trying to solve for, which reporting will always be one of them), you are ready for the next stage.
The Catered Demo
I recall a conversation with a customer service management consultant, Elizabeth Winter, who helps her clients improve their staff workflows, management experience and customer experience, which many times includes new tools. I asked her, “What do your clients look for in a demo when they are sourcing a new contact center solution?” Her answer, “The winning vendors were always those vendors that took the time to understand their business and how to solve issues. It becomes very apparent very quickly in the demo those vendors that know the customer’s business and industry versus those that do not.”
Your job, as the seller/relationship manager, is to ensure that your demonstrator is hitting on the features that map to those issues. You want the three to six “yes that will solve that particular issue we discussed last week” to get the big “YES.” When the demo is complete, you want agreement that your service offering can help them. From the buyer perspective, they are qualifying you as a vendor for the short list. Typically, at this point, if you demonstrated how you’ll solve the issues, what you have just done is won another champion in the committee of decision makers. If the demo went great, you just won the endorsement of the business user.
A Defined Post Demo Plan
You are not going to be in the room when the committee gets together to evaluate the short list of vendors and whittle it down to the last one. You need a proxy in the room. In our experience, if your “champion” is the business user, you will win the sale two-thirds of the time. (Of course, sometimes, IT still decides what tools customer service uses).
As your follow up, you want to use your IT champion to get back-channel feedback on the demo and how it went. For your quote presentation meeting, you want to ensure that you educate the business user on how your solution will solve the issues that are driving them to buy a solution. What you are doing is giving that person their talk track in the committee meeting when they point to your quote. As the seller, you need to build consensus with the committee on your offering. So, you must use your champions to help you navigate their buying process politics.
As UCaaS continues to become commoditized, what is left is your relationship with the customer and how you help them improve in their jobs and outcomes. When customers realize the improvements because of your solution, they then become your reference. For larger organizations, these people will help you find more user groups with issues as they tout what a great decision they made and point to their success.
Team Intermedia has devoted years in helping our partners leverage their wireline customers to expand ARPU via CCaaS and now UCaaS with the announcement of our Ascend brand for service providers.
Allister Quinteros is director, sales solution, CCaaS for Intermedia.
