The UC Upper Hand: Keep More Of The Money You Make

Technology is pricey, and it’s always changing. Keeping customers up-to-date is becoming an expensive and extensive undertaking. However, if solution providers don’t keep up, they risk missing opportunities to decrease costs and stay competitive.

For partners selling telephony, cost and competition are no longer a pain point thanks to unified communications. “There’s no hardware on premise,” explains Mark Sher, vice president of product management and marketing at Intermedia. “When we take all of this, move it into the cloud and deliver it over your existing internet connection, you don’t have to worry about buying, managing and maintaining hardware.” Sher goes on to say this also saves partners more money, because their UCaaS services are all bundled into one solution.

Intermedia’s unified communications solution – Intermedia Unite – integrates voice, video conferencing, chat and more. It enables businesses to be nimbler, collaborative, communicative and mobile. UCaaS also gives partners the opportunity to offer valuable services with great margins to their customers. Sher says by offering a full suite of services of high value, partners can better own the customer relationship.

In order to own this relationship, solution providers should look to vendors who are partner-focused that will give them the support they need in order to sell unified communications effectively. Sher says Intermedia wants to deliver, “the highest reliability, the highest quality and the best support,” to all of its partners.

“The better we position our partners to be able to do that on our behalf, the more successful we’re going to be together,” adds Eric Roach, global vice president of field channel sales at Intermedia.

Intermedia’s Online Partner Concierge Desk helps solution providers sell Intermedia Unite. They take care of everything from reviewing quotes, to communicating with a sales engineer and putting in new orders. Then, once a partner deploys and configures Unite to their customer’s network, it’s ready to use.

“It’s our job to make that process as efficient as possible,” says Sher. “That’s going to allow the partner to retain as much of the margin as possible.”