on selling anything-as-a-service…
From an analyst on 8×8: “The pandemic has accelerated the move to replace premise based enterprise communication systems and contact centers solutions with cloud applications. … [our] integrated offering from 8×8 has been branded Experience Communication as a Service (XCaaS)… XCaaS represented 30% of total annual recurring revenue (ARR) for 8×8 in the last period, with the majority of sales from UCaaS + CCaaS bundles. XCaaS is growing at 2x the market rate. XCaaS represented 80% of 8×8’s top deals for FY’21, which ended March 31, 2021, and was nine of the top ten deals in Q4.”
They want to label everything — and do so horribly. The industry constantly pushes product as a solution; not pushing solutions or pain resolution. It is feature over function or outcome. It is why it took a pandemic to get people to migrate to cloud. Because the sales process was awful! The marketing missed the mark! The bundles, packages, licensing were about the vendor — not about the customer.
In a time of CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS and VCaaS, and now XCaaS, it needs to stop. Offer a solution to the customer that has a real outcome for them. They were buying Zoom to do Facetime. They bought MS Teams for presence, collaboration and messaging. They weren’t buying VCaaS or UC&C or any other acronym that the lame ass marketing departments came up with. Businesses were on fire and needed solutions. It was about solving pain. It was about Outcome.
Years of pushing products and whatever-as-a-service was all nonsense. It didn’t work.
People don’t buy Workday or Salesforce because it is SaaS. They buy it for what the software will do for the business. Our industry keeps forgetting that we aren’t selling Tech. We are leveraging the technology to deliver business needs.
People really don’t care if the internet is coming on 4G, 5G, fiber, copper, satellite — all they care about is being able to stream Netflix without buffering. They don’t care if it is VoIP or POTs, they just want the phone to work. Get it?