Offering a modern suite of telephony solutions can allow you to objectively assess a prospect’s business communications and offer them a great deal, helping to secure their business.
Communication in the modern age
Are you keeping an eye on your customers’ changing communications needs? How about prospects? Are you able to compete with the other proposals they have on the table? If you answered ‘no’ to either question, it’s time to start moving your telephony business into the modern age.
A good host
More than 75% of UK businesses are now using some form of cloud computing and they’re getting used to the benefits. For a single monthly fee companies can enjoy access to cloud services, the ability to scale those services up or down as needed and unlimited, free support. The telephony industry took a while to catch up to these trends but hosted phone systems have made delivery of telephony services through the cloud a reality. Selling a hosted phone system not only allows you to stay competitive, but will also provide more in-depth knowledge into your customers’ business communication needs.
Keep an eye on it
Advising a customer or prospect that they could be paying less for a service is a sure-fire way to get their attention. For existing customers, you’ll increase their loyalty to your business. For prospects, you’re more likely to close the sale. Try using the following techniques to help be proactive when it comes to your customers’ business communications needs:
› Monitor usage – If your customers are spending a lot of money on per-minute charges by calling company mobiles, you may be able to eliminate those costs entirely by providing a hosted solution that automatically diverts incoming office calls directly to employees mobiles. The key here is to spend some time reviewing your customers’ current usage and then providing those customers with proposed cost savings. If you don’t have the tools required to look into usage information, it’s time to start reviewing the types of telephony services that you offer. ISDN is on the way out the door, whilst SIP and hosted solutions are flying ahead as the solutions of choice for many companies. Cloud-based technology is typically providing significantly improved metrics for you to review.
› Review bills – For existing customers, review their current bills to make sure everything is accurate and to identify areas where adopting a different solution could result in potential savings to them. For prospects, take a look at their current bill to see where cost savings might occur if they switched to your services. Some vendors even provide a bill review service to their resellers, where bills for customers and prospects are reviewed by a team whose job it is to identify any potential cost savings. If your supplier doesn’t offer something like this, you may be losing out.
Get there first
Being proactive can go a long way in making customers feel like you’re the right choice for their business communication needs. When you reach out to a customer to ask if they would like to reduce their bills, you stop seeming like the big bad phone company who is only interested in profits. With a proactive approach you can start humanising your company, putting customers at ease and, in the long term, making it a more difficult decision for customers who are considering migrating their services to another provider.
