One caution, pre and post sales support (when selling to business customers) can kill your margins if you don’t quote it properly. There’s also the question of whether you want to lease phones to the customer, or have them buy their own.
A small business may want all sorts of live demos before the sale, then post sale there will be a bunch of configuration, training, and adjustments for the first couple months, then a lower level of ongoing maintenance. It is totally fair to quote a system with a certain amount of configuration and training, either onsite or at your facility, and then an option for either per hour labor for maintenance after that, or a maintenance plan that guarantees a certain number of hours per month. Some customers will just need an initial config and a few hours of training, others will be very needy. If you just do all this for free, it can suck up all your profits. As far as phones, there are pros and cons to both methods. If the customer buys the phones and you don’t require them to use a certain source, they may get phones off eBay or Amazon and they are refurbs or have old firmware or are inappropriate models. Also of course if the customer buys the phones, and some of them fail, it’s their cost. If you lease the phones, and the customer cancels, you may have a bunch of used phones to refurb and lease to another customer or sell on eBay. Similar situation if the customer decides to upgrade all their leased phones to a fancier model. Like most leased hardware, you probably want to recover your cost in a year, even though the customer may consider this a ripoff. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Daniel White Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2019 8:56 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Selling managed PBX vs phone line I agree, I'd never sell it that way to an end user. An MSP or ISP that just wants to stop managing their switch (a switch and a PBX are not the same thing) perhaps... but I've not run into a provider yet that asked me that question where I wasn't more competitive then their rates anyways. The bigger issue will be the finger pointing game for an end user when it doesn't work. "My phones don't work"... "looks like it is your carrier"... "they say it's you"... Just like bandwidth, you should be buying from multiple carriers to increase your chances of number portability or getting numbers in harder to get rate centers while giving you failover should a carrier have an outage (and it happens... ThinQ had a major outage in February). Matt doing the paperwork isn't that hard. Use Inteserra or Compliance Solutions to do it all for you and you will still make 50%+ margins. <https://atheral.com/> Daniel White Co-Founder - Business Development & Operations direct: +1 (702) 470-2766 <https://www.facebook.com/getatheral> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/atheral/> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPZv-EsGCj8LXfzylwCrjQ> Ken Hohhof wrote on 4/7/19 06:54: Back in the days of the analog phone system screwed to the wall in the phone closet, many small businesses had a “phone guy” they paid regularly to do all their employee moves/adds/changes, configure IVR trees and voicemail, set up MOH, train employees, do software upgrades, and fix the hardware when it broke. This cost a lot and I assume was a lucrative business. But the whole idea of cloud PBX is to get away from the hassle and expense of having the phone guy come out on a monthly basis. So in 2019 not 1999, I think Lewis is probably right. Of course there are probably a few customers who want the latest technology and still want to pay big bucks to somebody to babysit it for them. Maybe the same people who buy the extended warranty at Best Buy, or who pay the phone company for inside wiring maintenance. From: AF <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Lewis Bergman Sent: Saturday, April 6, 2019 9:50 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Selling managed PBX vs phone line Why would you is the question. The majority of the money is in the origination and termination. I don't think you could compete in the space without offering it. On Sat, Apr 6, 2019 at 9:31 PM Daniel White <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Yes you can do it and we do offer that to some ISP's that would rather provider their own origination and termination. For the most part, our bulk pricing though beats what an individual ISP can purchase. As long as you do not provide an interconnection to the PSTN, there isn't any regulatory burden. <https://atheral.com/> Daniel White Co-Founder - Business Development & Operations direct: +1 (702) 470-2766 <https://www.facebook.com/getatheral> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/atheral/> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPZv-EsGCj8LXfzylwCrjQ> Matt Hoppes wrote on 4/6/19 12:53: Exactly my thought. You’d connect them to the termination providers who would bill them directly. On Apr 6, 2019, at 14:28, David Thake <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: You can certainly sell Cloud PBX without origination and termination. The sip trunk and DID could be sourced by the client from another SIP provider while you just handle the PBX setup and maintenance whilst getting a commission from the sip trunk provider perhaps... It really depends what you want to do. <DAVID.png> On 6 Apr 2019, at 20:25, Ken Hohhof <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: I don't understand how you would sell managed cloud PBX without origination and termination, seems like it would be part of the package. If you bill them, and they can make calls to/from the PSTN via the service you sell them, I believe that makes you an interconnected VoIP provider. -----Original Message----- From: AF <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Matt Hoppes Sent: Saturday, April 6, 2019 12:56 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] Selling managed PBX vs phone line Is there any difference? I know if you sell voip phone lines you have to file 499s and a bunch of other things. If you’re selling a managed PBX in the cloud to a business customer does that still make you a voip provider? Or only if they don’t have their own termination provider and you’re doing the termination for them? -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com All email communication is subject to our privacy policy. The privacy policies may be viewed here: https://www.vanilla.net.mt/privacy/ https://www.maltashopper.com/PrivacyPolicy -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- Lewis Bergman 325-439-0533 Cell
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