The cloud-based hosted PBX market has experienced steady and considerable growth during the past 5 years. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 witnessed flourishing demands of hosted PBX services to support working from home for quarantined employees. As remote working might be here to stay and become the new norm even after the pandemic, VoIP providers are also making full-featured cloud PBX solutions part of their portfolio to adapt to the changing needs, not only for now but also for the post-pandemic market.
For those that are still on the fence, the lingering concern might be where to start. The hosted PBX market will open up once you have a viable go-to-market strategy. This post will walk you through the top 5 things to consider before starting a hosted PBX business.
Firstly, who are your potential customers?
In the hunt for prospective customers, identifying them properly will save you great time and energy. Here is a list for reference:
- Multi-location organizations
- Businesses with remote workers
- Entities, including start-ups, concerned about CAPEX
- Firms not interested in owning or running PBX equipment
- Companies require flexibility to add users and concurrent calls readily
Secondly, what are your selling points?
Your major competitive edge should be a quality product and service. Consider how the cloud-based hosted PBX differentiates and emphasizes the features which your customers cannot access with other solutions. Here are some talking points you can bring up:
- Focus on the proven cost savings
- Highlight the advance of unified communications
- Stress the importance of flexible deployment options
- Emphasize low administration effort
- Sell yourself as a trusted advisor and absolute expert
Thirdly, what are your customers calling for?
Don’t rush in with a slew of features your hosted PBX system has to offer. Now that you are able to offer the comprehensive feature set, next up is to understand how your customers use their phone systems respectively and what communications need still left to be addressed.
Certainly, there can be an obsession with features when it comes to business phone systems. The fact is that your customers may not care much about those fancy features. What your customers want is something capable of removing their pain points. Craft on-demand PBX solutions boasting the features designed for certain scenarios and you will see favorable gains.
Fourthly, what is the right sales approach?
Selling hosted PBX means you follow the cloud revenue model. Instead of having your customers purchase lump-sum packages, when it comes to hosted PBX business, you can now generate recurring revenue by selling based on monthly subscriptions. Smaller customers may want to buy services on a per-seat basis while larger customers prefer purchasing at a higher flat fee. Once you have an inclusive platform that allows you to deliver, manage, and scale easily, it would be easy to create such a streamlined business model.
Last but not least, which vendor should you turn to?
The right approach to the hosted PBX market is the cornerstone of your success. Look for a vendor that has experience with businesses similar to yours. They are far more likely to understand the potential pitfalls you may encounter and should have the best practices to overcome those obstacles. Here are a few things to look for just for your reference:
- Does the vendor offer a broad range of solutions that adapt to your target customers’ needs?
- Does the vendor stay up to date on the industry standards and the latest technology trends?
- Does the vendor offer the right tools to assist in deploying and managing customer-premises devices?
- How well is the product compatible with trunks and endpoints? What about the ability to integrate with 3rd party applications?
- Does the vendor have the expertise to deliver the best quality of technical support? Are they proactive and responsive?
Designed with a multi-instance infrastructure, Yeastar Cloud PBX Platform incorporates Yeastar Management Plane (YMP) and easy-to-deploy dedicated Cloud PBX instances for service providers to deliver hosted voice services and unified communications solutions and make an easy and quick entry into the market. If you prefer to craft and launch your own cloud PBX service instead of reselling it from third-party providers, YMP is a good fit for you with fast time-to-market and reduced management complexity.
We also provide flexible deployment and purchasing models. You can either get started without preparing any server to save substantial upfront investment or bring your own infrastructure to stay in complete control of the platform and hosting environment.
Don’t shy away from the competition and hosted PBX business. Leave the comfort zone to embrace more opportunities.