The UCaaS land-grab is in full swing.  Gartner declared UCaaS transitioning from Early Adopter to Early Majority last year.  This means UCaaS is in the fastest and steepest part of the adoption curve – more people will be adopting UCaaS for the 1st time than proabalay ever before or ever again!  Our UCaaS channel partner sales speak for themselves, doubling revenue sold in the past year!

And that’s saying a lot given AVANT has sold over 350,000 UCaaS seats to date.

UCaaS is also pretty sticky – once customers adopt UCaaS, it’s harder to unseat them.  UCaaS does not have the natural update cycles on-premises equipment has, such as maintenance renewals, hardware EOL or product update versions (UCaaS auto updates and maintenance is part of the service).  Equipment PBX manufacturers have been increasingly struggling.  Nortel is gone, Ayaya just went through bankruptcy, and the major UCaaS players are getting absorbed by traditional equipment players: Cisco purchased BroadSoft, the platform behind many UCaaS offerings. and Mitel purchased Shortel, adopting Shortel’s UCaaS service as it’s primary cloud offering.

Now is the time to go all in on UCaaS as a cornerstone of your sales strategy for 2018 and stake your claim in one of the biggest land grabs in IT sales history.  With that in mind, let’s get tactical about driving some UCaaS opportunities right away.  We scheduled UCaaS Pitch Practice as the topic for our January BattleBriefing to help you sharpen your skills and close more UCaaS business. You can register here for the BattleBriefing.

In advance of pitch practice, here’s a quick guide to first-meetings for UCaaS opportunities so that you’re primed and ready to make your pitch!

Legacy Equipment Buying Triggers

There are certain events or circumstances in a customer’s life cycle that will make them more likely to act on purchasing UCaaS.  The most acute opportunity is when a customer has:

  • Equipment that is end-of-life,
  • Maintenance contract is up for renewal, or
  • Their existing PBX is from one of the many manufacturers that have recently been swallowed, gone under, in Bankruptcy, or moved to a cloud model.

Key Qualifiers

Any customer with one or more of the following qualifiers is also a great prospect:

  • Multi location customers or mobile workforces are a great qualifier for zeroing in on a target customer segment. UCaaS offers a common communication experience no matter where the user is located.
  • Verticals that utilize call centers or have strict regulatory requirements would also be a powerful filter to apply.  There are many advantages to a cloud based solution, providing ease of scalability, unified regulatory tracking, and pre-integration with many CRM platforms.

Start the Conversation

Start simple. But start!

  • Are you happy with your current communication platform?
  • When is your PBX up for renewal/update/EOL?
  • Are you happy with the maintenance and management across all your locations?
  • Do you have many different platforms?  Is that working for you?
  • Are you meeting all your compliance requirements?
  • What do you wish you could do that you can’t do today?

Our AVANT channel managers have an email we drafted that you can copy, paste, and customize for your needs that will help you make that first contact.  It could also serve as a script to make cold calls.  Not an AVANT partner?  Get started now.

AVANT also has an Interactive Quick Assessment (iQA) form specifically for UCaaS to help guide you in your discovery conversation with potential prospects.  AVANT’s iQAs are part of our AVANT BattleApp.  When you submit an iQA, even with just the most basic info filled in, AVANT’s Sales Engineers quickly can narrow in on the short list of UCaaS partners that are the best fit for your prospect.  Our sales engineers are savants when it comes of understanding our portfolio of UCaaS solutions.  We review 100’s of UCaaS iQAs and opportunities monthly.  They have used this experience to create easy to understand UCaaS comparative matrices to help you and your customer understand their options.

AVANT’s BattleLab and UCaaS Demo Center

AVANT has assembled all the major UCaaS platforms in one place in our BattleLab where you are welcome to bring your customer for a side-by-side bake off.  It’s one of the best resources available to AVANT channel partners help close UCaaS sales.

Join us for the UCaaS Pitch Practice BattleBriefing

Perfecting your pitch is the most important thing you can do.  You only get 1 chance to make a 1st impression.  Join us January 11th for our next BattleBriefing: UCaaS Pitch Practice so you’re prepared to drive new UCaaS opportunities in 2018!