By Peter Radizeski
UCaaS sales have stalled for the publicly traded providers, and there is more than one reason why that has happened.
One reason is that the pandemic is done; there isn’t a fire that needs to be put out anymore. In 2020, most businesses moved to UCaaS in a knee jerk reaction to everyone having to work from home. Now, three years later, they are evaluating that move and that spend.
With shadow IT, some organizations have licensing creep with individual employees buying licenses for Zoom, Slack, etc. The IT department had rolled out one system, but the employees were using other things. All of this has to be reckoned with.
SMBs have always liked on-premises PBXs. Buy it once for a couple thousand and it lasts and lasts. Why pay for recurring seats when dial-tone is cheap?
Service providers have been lowering prices to make sales. One rather large public company has a $6.61 average seat price for UCaaS. Now they only compensate partners on full sticker price, which even their own direct sales force can’t get.
Commissions were cut by at least three UCaaS providers. When 45 percent to 55 percent of your deals come from partners and the company messes with commissions, sales will suffer. When the company promotes a SPIFF but then doesn’t pay it because of clause 2.4.5, partners will look elsewhere.
More and more white label UCaaS providers are popping up. This gives partners the ability to make their own margin. No SPIFFs but better commissions that are certainly evergreen.
The musical chairs in many c-suites have not done any provider any favors, as well. It takes time to put a strategy in place and execute on it. Most people don’t get even two years for that to happen. Musical chairs make your company look confused. It makes strategy uneven. It doesn’t showcase steady and solid.
Most of the providers – Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft – have rolled out hundreds of features and upgrades – yet no one knows what they are! Spending effort and money on development and then not telling that story about the benefits over the new features is the same as not having those features.
Also, where is the user training? There should be continual user training on ways to leverage these platforms to make life easy for the employees. User adoption is the key to a sticky customer. If you have 400 features and the employees use five common features, they go to the cheapest. If the platform has a real benefit – such as decreasing the appointment no-show rate – and the employees have been trained how to use that, it is sticky, and price isn’t an object.
Businesses see all this AI hype and are in a wait-and-see mentality. Why buy now, when all this cool whiz bang stuff will be out soon? The industry’s own hype machine is scaring off sales.
There is also hype around customer experience (CX). UC+CC and that CPaaS thing with AI will improve CX. That makes no sense to most people and doesn’t come with concrete benefits. It is the same with low-code, no-code platforms. What does that even mean to a business that has never launched a software development project? Heck, even when talking to the companies providing these functions (AI, low code), it doesn’t sound tangible. There aren’t enough real-world examples. (Maybe there are, but I have not read or heard them).
We are selling the invisible, yet we keep it invisible. Our job is to make it concrete, interesting and beneficial, so they buy it and use it.
Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consulting agency. RAD-INFO offers sales training, coaching and consulting. Peter is available to speak at your events on channel, marketing, strategy or sales.
