Who are you aiming for?
The Enterprise? The US has less than 19K businesses with more than 500 employees, which is the official definition of Enterprise.
Some providers use the term Enterprise to mean more than 250 employees. That’s fine but that market is small too – only 37K firms.
The under-served market is 10-100 employees, which, according to CompTIA, is 20% of the business market in the USA. That is about 1.2 million businesses.
Enterprise consists of employees with certifications by Cisco and Microsoft. By default, they will purchase from those 2 vendors. Every other vendor has to work extra hard to get a slice of that.
Enterprise tend to lean on Gartner MQ or IHS or some other analyst report. Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel and a few others are on those lists in the UC space. They are familiar brands. West, Fuze, and a couple of others are not familiar brands, but they have a portfolio of clients that they can reference, whose logos you would recognize.
Enterprise has requirements like software integration, analytics, Contact Center, SD-WAN/MPLS and more. (See investor filings from the public UCaaS providers.) Professional services will be required for Enterprise. Someone will have to do some not minor software integration. A dumb API into your switch will not be enough.
The saying goes that it takes just as long to land a big account as a small one. Not so. Enterprise has budget cycles. Long sales cycles. It is called Whale Hunting for a reason.
And here’s the thing: while you sail the ocean looking to land Moby Dick, there’s no revenue coming in. Just sales expenses.
I’m not saying not to chase Enterprise but if that is your only target, ask yourself: How do I stack against the companies on the Gartner MQ report? Who are my reference customers? What is my Value Proposition?
Why would Enterprise buy your service?