Hosted PBX Channel: More Power Than Meets the EyeHosted PBX Channel: More Power Than Meets the Eye
Channel partners can propel the entire hosted PBX industry to sustained triple-digit growth from now through 2020.
October 19, 2015
Channel partners can propel the entire hosted PBX industry to sustained triple-digit growth from now through 2020.
Hosted PBX channel partners will soon be finding and closing 90% of all hosted PBX sales. Yet channel partners today find and close only about 20% of all hosted PBX sales. In what may come as a surprise to readers, technology providers today sell some 80% of hosted PBX solutions directly to customers. This go-to-market approach limits overall hosted PBX sales growth and comes with considerable consequence for customers at-large.
As a practical matter, numerous hosted PBX channels and channel partners already exist. Collectively, these channel partners are capable of summoning far more sales resources than the hosted PBX technology vendors. While it is a fact that today's hosted PBX channel partners take more deals from lead generation to sale than occurred in the past, the evolution has been slow. Customers will benefit if the channel partners pick up the pace.
Because the hosted PBX market has shown respectable double-digit sales growth year over year, there has been little reason to question the business practices underpinning hosted PBX sales results. But Eastern Management Group looked into this because we believe hosted PBX sales, at this stage of life, should be doubling annually.
How Hosted PBX Sales Are Made
Current hosted PBX channel practices shortchange the market. Hosted PBX sales could double each year between now and 2020, but that would require different hosted PBX channel practices.
Indirect marketing by hosted PBX technology companies is the catalyst for most hosted PBX sales. Prospective customers are exposed to various calls-to-action initiated by keyword searches, Google Ads, radio, billboards, blogs, and all manner of indirect marketing. Several hosted PBX vendors are quite good at indirect marketing, but having the indirect marketing tools outside the mastery of all channel partners creates a bottleneck.
Such a condition keeps sales prospecting under the control of the few, that being hosted PBX vendors, rather than under the domination by the many, that being the hosted PBX channel partners. When the hosted PBX vendor monopolizes its indirect marketing and then follows up using its call center reps to close sales -- bypassing the channel partner altogether -- consequences come into play for the customer, partner, and hosted PBX technology vendor.
Consequences
Customers see smaller portfolios - Hosted PBX vendors can lack the broad portfolio of products, software, and services readily available from their channel partners -- and their partners' partners. By dealing only with the vendor, a customer can miss seeing all the options available from the vendor's channel partners. If the channel partner is a distributor, then the customer may not see hundreds of complimentary solutions.
