Why it doesn’t make sense to have a “me too” Cloud PBX offering if you can’t make the numbers work

Coming off of two back-to-back conferences we have spoken to hundreds of MSP and IT shops. The conversations this past week are really no different than what we see on a regular basis. IT & MSPs don’t have a stellar strategy in most cases when it comes to how they handle Unified Communications or Voice in their business. From our perspective this is how the landscape looks.

• 30 % say they are a reseller for a big label noticeable name but don’t have many customers running on them
• 25% are still referring their customers to a 3^rd party who say there is going to be some back and forth referrals and then it doesn’t happen …down the line that voice vendor gets into the IT business and now becomes a competitor
• 15% play musical chairs and are resellers for multiple companies and try to squeeze the most they can out of whoever is offering the most aggressive deal but then have to deal with the multi-vendor management which can get cumbersome after the fact
• 10% say they are a reseller for a big label noticeable name and have customers there but are not making much money to show for it
• 10% have invested in their own infrastructure in some data center somewhere and claim they are making money at it but then forget that deprecation and time have a cost to it
• 10% have no strategy at all and simply won’t touch the UC / Voice story period

With that being said, clearly the field of options here doesn’t excite you when you actually sit back and really think about it. So where do you fit into this? Why are you not standardizing your offering? Why are not you not generating any significant revenue from this?

To some there seems to be a fear about rolling a UC option into their IT / Managed Services offering and to others the answer has been it’s not worth my time to concentrate on it and that I only say I do it because the next guy competing against me says he does it but only go down that road if I absolutely need to do it.

The reality is ignoring this inside your companies is a mistake. Get ahead of it instead of reacting to it. Make a true profit center out of it rather than some reseller relationship where you barely benefit.

Don’t bring some “big box name” into the equation with your customer and expect that they are just going to call some toll free number when they have a problem instead of calling your help desk first. They second they do, that small commission you are supposed to be getting every month was just lost because the cost of your time is worth more than the commission.

So where can you go to make this all work for you? I can think of a company right now that may have a really good answer…