Selling VoIP Starts with Good Partners

By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor

A big shift is underway as businesses and the telecom industry as a whole move from traditional, TDM-based phone service to voice-over-IP (VoIP).

Not only is there a shakeup as firms look to change their phone communications, there also are entirely new directions such as connecting voice with chat, presence and video conferencing, collectively known as unified communications (UC)—and having offerings hosted in the cloud. Cloud communications represents a big shift, as it moves services away from the business and to a managed services model where the equipment is software in the cloud.

The shift is opportunity for value-added resellers, as there are plenty of competing solutions and also plenty of questions about how to properly transition.

Helping resellers with this opportunity is CoreDial, which helps resellers sell, deliver, manage and invoice cloud communications products and services.

Part of how it helps resellers is by not only offering cloud services, but also making them flexible and branded, according to CoreDial’s Alan Rihm.

“We are a little different in how we address channel partners,” Rihm told TMCnet during ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami this past January. “We’ve build this platform where they sign up and use the software to sell, deliver, manage and invoice for all these cloud communication products and services under their own brand. There’s actually a very flexible branding strategy, so we can even have service providers who have sub-service providers and brand, co-brand it or private label it.”

CoreDial also has set it up to deliver better margins than most channel programs.

“The best part about the whole program is that our partners are making as much as 60-65 percent gross profit margin, which is kind of unheard of,” he told us.

“Typically, when you hear companies say they have a channel, they mean an agent program where agents can sell their services and make maybe 10 or 15 points, and it is not a branded or co-branded or private label system—it is branded by the primary provider,” he added. “With us that’s very different. So our partners can have more control, deliver more value, and make really amazing margins.”

CoreDial also has been working on expanding its offerings to give resellers more choices. It recently has expanded to include not only the Asterisk (News - Alert) platform, but also BroadCom’s Broadworks.

“What it basically does is give them options,” he noted. “So when they’re out there, they don’t just have one switch platform to provide hosted PBX (News - Alert), VoIP, SIP trunking and unified communications, they can pick an Asterisk platform, they can pick a Broadsoft platform. It gives them more options to compete and win.”

And for many resellers, win they will. 

Edited by Cassandra Tucker