During a discussions at Cloud Connections 25, how do we migrate people to cloud comms quickly?
After 20 years of pushing the concept of IP-PBX, Hosted PBX, UCaaS, Cloud Phone and other variations on this, there is no magic bullet to get customers to move.
For some, the on-premise PBX is not only the best bargain, but it is the most secure and one they have the most control over. It is also status quo. And the biggest problem is getting businesses to buy CHANGE! That is really what technology sales is about: selling Change.
Often we just sell a replacement product for less money: POTS Replacement, SIP Trunks, broadband, etc. This doesn’t require any change, but moving from a familiar desktop phone to an app is a big deal.
To sell UCaaS, you really have to be Efficient. Efficient at selling and implementing. For very small business (under 10 employees), self-service is key. Along with self-service must come Internet sales, SEO and online ads (Google Adwords, Bing, LinkedIn or similar). And the provider has to not only get efficient at the marketing piece (although that CAN be outsourced), but efficient at handling the leads.
BTW, these folks don’t search for keyword “UCaaS”!
As you move up the employee count, say 20-75, there may be an IT guy involved as a part-timer, freelancer or IT shop. From 75-150 employees, there is usually at least one IT employee. Different segments of the market have different Buyers and different Buyer Influencers.
When you consider that 26M businesses with payroll in the US are under 500 employees and 15M of those are under 10 employees, this is the largest segment of the SMB.
There are outside companies coming into the phone service business like Podium and FlipCX. These are software companies that can easily add voice to their AI assistant or AI Voice Receptionist.
In fact, so many companies are adding voice – Zoho (CRM), ServiceNow (ticketing), Freshworks (accounting) – and if they add AI chatbots and AI assistants, that will squeeze UCaaS providers even more.
Not everyone thinks AI and receptionist are phone system functions.
Selling PBX Replacement seems like a great opportunity due to the 80M-100M PBX seats still standing, but NEC, Mitel and Avaya are great showcases for how freaking hard that is to do!!!!
BTW, an article from 8×8 on why businesses moved off PBX HERE!