How to Sell a VoIP Phone System

Part 1 – Meeting with the Customer

As a reseller, you should always be trying to improve your sales processes and we thought we should start with the initial sales meeting and try to come up with some tips. We asked some of our top resellers for tips on handling the initial sales meeting and got some really good advice. Some of this may be common sense and hopefully some of it will be something new that will help you out. In this first part of a three-part series we look at some best practices for handling the sales meeting. Part 2 will discuss Designing the call flow, and part 3 will cover Preparing the quote. If you would like to participate in our current survey, please click here.

Understanding Customer Requirements

One of the hardest things to learn is how to collect the customer requirements, after all, don’t they just need to make and receive phone calls? The reality is that everyone’s requirements are different and understanding these requirements will help you to provide the right solution to your customers. While you may think you are offering them a huge improvement over their antiquated system, they will have business processes, existing features, and even habits that you need to contend with. If you fail to consider all of these things, you may end up putting in a system that your client can’t use effectively and may eventually reject. As good as you may think you are at interviewing your potential client for their requirements, there may be things that they do with their phones without really thinking about it purely out of habit, and trying to get them to explain these things to you is often quite difficult.

Some of the things you need to learn about the company’s existing system include:

• How are calls answered
• How are calls transferred
• How are calls put on hold while someone is found
• How do they deal with off-hours and holidays
• How do they handle paging
• Do they require key system type of functionality
• Do they need good reporting tools
• What features of their current system do they use extensively
• What are the “cant live without” features of their current system
• What are the things they hate about their existing system

Be sure and talk to multiple people at the office because not everyone will use the phone system the same way.

The VoIP Phone System Demo

New resellers often start off by doing a demo of the administration system of a VoIP Phone system. Although this seems like a good idea initially, the downside is that it can show a client how easy it is to maintain and manage the system. While this may actually be your intention, if the client feels like the system is easy enough for them to manage themselves, it will be much harder to sell a support contract.
A common suggestion for you to do during the demo is to show what the user experience will be like, not what the administrator experience is like. You are better off showing several phone models to choose from, showing how functions like hold, transfer, and conferencing work, showing off the phone systems desktop applications, and showing any user portal that the users will be able to use.

What you are better off doing is to try to show is how the typical user will be using the phone system during the typical day.

The Call Flow

Once you have all of the requirements, it’s time to discuss the call flow. You never know what you are getting into on a job until you have a flow chart that shows you what the customer wants their phone system to do. While the vast majority is going to be easy enough to sketch on a cocktail napkin, I have been to meetings where the call flow filled FIVE complete 8’ x 4’ whiteboards!! Obviously, the labor quote needed to be adjusted to accommodate the extremely complicated call flow. You cannot properly prepare a VoIP phone system quote until you have had the call flow meeting.

The Site Survey

In a previous article we talked about creating a site survey for your VoIP phone system deployments, the best time to do this is right before you leave from the

first meeting as you may need to incorporate network changes into your quote. The site survey will help you gather all of the technical requirements for your quote.

Putting it all together

With all of the information gathered during the initial sales meeting, it is now time to go back to the office and put together a quote. Most resellers never like handing out quotes at the initial sales meeting because they need to go check current prices, estimate their labor, possibly redesign their call flow for what the system will actually do, estimate training time, as well as double check their figures to make sure they are not missing anything. In an upcoming article we will discuss different ways of presenting the quote back to the customer.

Series links

Part 1 – The Sales Meeting
Part 2 – Designing the call flow
Part 3 – The Quote

As always, if you have tips and comments to share on this topic, please leave them in the comments section. Again, if you would like to participate in our current survey, please click here.