How to Grow Your Business as a UCaaS Provider

Cloud telephony was already on the rise before the pandemic hit. Many large businesses have been shifting to the cloud over the past decade in order to take their share of the $1 trillion in business value cloud adoption is predicted to offer Fortune 500 companies by 2030.

But with the establishment of hybrid work models in the new normal, the interest in cloud services among companies of all sizes has picked up even more steam. According to a 2021 Frost & Sullivan survey, for 74 percent of organizations globally, the cloud is the most critical part of their digital transformation strategy.

We’re moving into a new cloud era, where businesses are looking more deeply into what the cloud can do for them. And for many, UCaaS is at the heart of their journey because it supports remote work, reduces reliance on in-house IT resources, and powers better experiences for employees and customers.

This has opened up a significant opportunity for IT service providers. If your business is well-positioned to provide UCaaS solutions to your customers, you can ride this wave of growth into the next decade — the cloud telephony market is expected to continue growing at an average compound annual growth rate of 9.5 percent from 2022 to 2032.

However, in order to grow your business as a UCaaS provider and build strong relationships with your customers, it’s important to partner with a vendor that supports your success. Let’s look at the opportunities and what IT companies reselling unified communications need to thrive in this space.

The Opportunity for Growth as a UCaaS Reseller

Where large enterprise IT teams work directly with UCaaS providers, mid-market companies — those with between 50 and 500 users — look to their IT service providers to fulfill their cloud communications needs.

That means, for managed service providers (MSPs), value-added resellers (VARs), and other cloud resellers, there’s an opportunity to sell unified communications services to existing IT customers. There’s also room to attract new customers with a UCaaS solution that offers everything small to mid-sized businesses need: security, reliability, performance, support, and built-in compliance.

But there’s more to becoming such a pivotal player to your customers than simply providing IT hardware and services. Mid-market businesses want their IT service provider to also have the necessary skills to handle challenges, such as implementation, integration, and data protection.

They also need to be able to trust your company.

As an IT reseller, trust is built as a result of:

1. Strong customer relationships
2. Customer confidence in the products offered

That’s why it’s so important to choose the right partnership model. If the UCaaS vendor you partner with offers one of the best cloud telephony solutions and enables your company to own the customer relationship, you can build trust, develop a sustainable revenue model with subscription-based cloud service, and grow your customer base.

What Does the Ideal UCaaS Offering and Partnership Look Like?

According to Frost & Sullivan’s report, Best Strategies to Grow Your Business as a UCaaS Reseller, when your company has a UCaaS offering that’s optimized for resellers, you can earn up to three times higher margins than you would with competing solutions.

Resellers should prioritize both the product and the partnership to achieve these high revenues.

The Ideal UCaaS Offering

You want to make sure you’re offering customers a high-quality UCaaS solution. Here’s what should be part of the package:

• Comprehensive features and easy integration. The software should unify business communications with cloud phone services, video conferencing, team chat, and file management. It should also integrate with other business applications, including contact center software, customer relationship management, and productivity apps.
• High-level security and built-in compliance. One of the biggest concerns of adopting cloud services is security. Cyberattacks increased during the pandemic — they grew by 15.1 percent from 2020 to 2021 — and data breaches continue to be a priority for businesses of all sizes. As a reseller, it’s paramount to choose a provider that can demonstrate top-notch physical, infrastructure, and data security and a commitment to helping end-users meet compliance regulations.
• Guaranteed reliability. Downtime is costly, and if you’re offering a UCaaS solution that’s not guaranteed to perform, your customers could end up frustrated with your service. Instead of taking chances with reliability, make sure the product you’re reselling comes with an SLA-backed 99.999% uptime guarantee.
• Stellar support. This goes from onboarding and cloud migration to technical support. You should partner with a cloud vendor that’s there for your company 24/7. You’ll also benefit if you have the option to let your vendor handle support for your customers if you don’t have the in-house resources.

The Ideal UCaaS Partnership

There are several partnership models for UCaaS resellers.

• Private-label resellers own the customer relationship and decide on what services to bundle and how to handle pricing and margins.
• Co-branding is where end-users see both brands — the UCaaS provider and your company.
• Reselling under the UCaaS vendor’s brand lets your company earn a portion of the recurring UCaaS revenues and own customer contracts.
• Agents sell the vendor’s product to earn either a one-time commission or recurring residuals.

What model works best for your business depends on the skills and resources your company has in-house. It also depends on the nature of the relationships you have with different customer segments.

So how can you optimize the partnership and grow your business?

By partnering with a UCaaS vendor that lets you choose the partner model on a granular level. That way, you decide what works best for your company with every new sale. And you determine the customer relationship.

Take Advantage of the Cloud Telephony Market — Partner with Intermedia

As an Intermedia Partner, you have everything you need to be a successful reseller. We provide marketing resources, training, award-winning support, and sales resources. We also let our partners own as much of the partner relationship as they want.

Learn more about how you can maximize profits and grow your business as a UCaaS reseller with Intermedia today.

Mark Sher

Mark Sher, a 30-year telecom and cloud communications executive, is the SVP of Product Marketing for Intermedia Cloud Communications, a leading provider of UCaaS, CCaaS, and business cloud application solutions to partners and the businesses they serve. In his role, Mark has global responsibility for all direct and indirect product marketing at Intermedia including product launches, product messaging and positioning, competitive intelligence, analyst relations, and cross-channel pricing.