Easily Deepen Your Wallet-share with Contact Center Solutions, SDN for Load Balancing, and Conferencing
This week, I share the last of my 13 jewels to help you increase sales. I hope you have been successful in adding the first ten questions to your sales conversation. My final three have to do with contact centers, SDN for load balancing, and conferencing.
11. Contact Center
Almost every company has a contact center. It may consist of a few reps taking orders from customers or hundreds of call center reps scheduling appointments, selling products, or helping employees with HR or IT questions.
Geoff Chretien, VP of Channels for inContact, recently told me that the standard rule of thumb is five hosted VoIP seats = one contact center seat. So if you are working with a company with 100 employees with hosted VoIP phones, you can bet they have 20 contact center seats somewhere inside.
Contact center solutions receive a call and place it in a queue for the next available attendant. Once the system detects an open operator, the call is delivered to that operator. inContact, our contact center solution of choice, delivers the call to a premised based phone system DID, a hosted voice DID, a mobile DID, or even a POTS line DID. (They can also provide the hosted VoIP seats underneath, but it’s not a requirement.)
Contact center seats run in the $100 per seat, per month price range. Therefore, if agents are not bringing up contact center solutions in their conversations with larger (50 plus employee) clients, they are walking away from a ton of revenue. Not to sound like a broken record, but inContact closes your leads for you (see a trend developing?) without any commission reduction.
12. SDN for Load Balancing
SDN is hot, but most agents are still uncertain what it does. Simply put, it’s a box that sits between your client’s LAN and two or more internet service providers. Plug it all in, and what you have is a device that understands that voice packets need the fastest route to the internet as possible, and the SDN then makes a decision on which ISP to use based on real-time traffic flow data. If ISP one is experiencing a virtual “traffic jam,” the important traffic routes through ISP two are used until the traffic jam clears up.
Using real-time intelligence to make routing decisions is at the heart of SDN. The brand that I see leading the way is VeloCloud, which can only be purchased through an authorized provider like FreeWire, MetTel, and Earthlink. Each of them has varying numbers of gateways to service their clients, but they all run on a VeloCloud backbone. They all range in price from $40-$200/month depending on how many megs of total throughput per second are running through the device.
In our office, we use VeloCloud on our fiber (primary) and coax (secondary) circuits and our over-the-top hosted voice experience has been vastly superior to what we suffered through initially. VeloCloud will soon be known as the hosted VoIP savior.
13. Web and Voice Conferencing
If there was ever a low-hanging fruit for agents, it is web and video conferencing. WebEx, GoToMeeting, and others are charging companies 100 to 300 percent too much for conference call bridges where they can share documents, PowerPoint slides, and videos. StartMeeting, by FreeConferenceCall.com, allows users to collaborate, talk, and share, for 50 to 70 percent less than the big guys.
Here at Telarus, we host two all-partner calls per week to train and educate our sales force. In early 2015, we switched from one of the big guys to StartMeeting and reduced our bill by over $4,000 per month. The savings allowed us to hire another employee. The only thing we had to do was send our partners a new URL and dial-in number. There is a massive opportunity to grab some easy dollars in this department.
Over the last few weeks we have given you ten questions to deepen the sales conversation.
1. What is your redundancy plan?
2. Would you like me to add free circuit monitoring to all of your circuits?
3. What is your plan to handle a hacker who successfully compromises your network?
4. Do you currently use a ShoreTel phone system?
5. Are you using Skype for Business as your phone system?
6. If you are processing credit cards, how do you ensure you are meeting PCI compliance?
7. Who manages your Office 365 environment? And when they say no one, you tell them you can!
8. Do you use or have plans to use Microsoft Azure for cloud computing and storage?
9. If you have Azure already or are thinking about Azure, what is your connectivity situation?
10. Do you use Amazon Web Services (AWS)? If so, would you be interested in learning how to use AWS more efficiently and reduce your bill?
This week let’s add three final questions:
11. Do you have representatives taking calls in a call center environment?
12. Have you considered using SDN for load balancing and to deliver better VoIP performance?
13. Are you using a web and video conference service like WebEx or GoToMeeting?
You are now locked and loaded with 13 great questions to ask in sales conversations. Do you have an “add-on” winner that has enabled you to increase your wallet-share with your existing clients that you’d like to share with me and my audience? Feel free to let us know in the comments field below.
I look forward to hearing your ideas!
