UCaaS Partnerships Made Easy

As a channel partner, you know how important it is to offer the full package to your customers – exceptional service, value, and total peace of mind regarding reliability, security, and compliance. The key to being able to deliver all this is to find the right UCaaS partnership.

But, often, channel partnerships favor the vendor. Or they simply aren’t as reseller-friendly as they should be. For example, the vendor might dictate the nature of the relationship, making it difficult for your company to increase its profit margins. Or they might not provide technical support, which puts too much of the burden on your IT experts.

Whatever the shortcomings of the relationship are, the bottom line is this: a poor partnership will make it difficult for your company to be successful.

Let’s look at what you should look for in a UCaaS partner and explore the potential of a partnership that benefits everyone – vendor, reseller, and end-users.

How the Right UCaaS Partnership Makes Your Cloud IT Company More Competitive

The reality is that unified communications is one of the top solutions businesses are seeking today. The global UCaaS market is growing fast – the projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2021 to 2026 is 16.7 percent.

But there are also plenty of IT resellers out there ready to take their slice of the market. In 2018, the channel already included anywhere from 75,000 to 125,000 partners in North America alone.

If you’re not able to offer your customers a five-star experience along with a full-featured unified communications solution at a great price, they’re going to look elsewhere to fulfill their needs.

That’s why finding the right partner is so important. But it’s not just about partnering with a big-name vendor. If your company doesn’t get the support and flexibility it needs to be successful, it’s going to be hard to grow your profits.

On the other hand, a good partner can help you deliver a superior experience to every UCaaS customer. And that’s exactly what you need to stand out in a crowded marketplace. In fact, the partner you choose can make or break your experience as a UCaaS reseller.

5 Things Your UCaaS Partner Should Offer

When channel partners and vendors work well together, they both win. It means more customers, sustainable profits, and faster growth for both parties.

Whether you’re a managed service provider (MSP) or another type of IT company, you know what your customers need from you to help them run their businesses. So let’s look at what you should look for in a UCaaS partner to help you run yours.

1. The Freedom to Choose Who Owns the Relationship

As a reseller, you can own the customer relationship fully – meaning you handle billing, bundling, and support, and only your brand is visible.

You can also choose to co-brand with your UCaaS partner. In that case, you still own the relationship with your customers but you’re leveraging your vendor’s brand to help drive sales.

A third option is to share the relationship – you interact with the customer directly but your vendor handles billing and support. In this scenario, your company earns commissions rather than the difference between wholesale charges and the price you set for your customers.

All of these options have pros and cons. And, depending on the relationship you have with each customer, one or the other might be a better fit. So, if you want to maximize your profits and deliver the best possible service, you need control over what type of relationship you have with each customer.

Traditionally, channel partnerships involve one model or another. But if you want to get the most out of your UCaaS partnership, look for a vendor that will let you decide what model to use for every sale.

2. Support Closing the Deal

Depending on how many employees you have on your customer-facing teams, you may or may not need support closing the deal. Either way, things like marketing materials, brandable collateral, and access to the vendor’s sales experts can help your team sell more software.

3. The Ability to Set Pricing

Reselling on a commission-based model has its advantages – once you sell the UCaaS solution, you don’t have to handle billing or support, which means you have more time to focus on other aspects of your business. This model might work well if you offer multiple cloud services.

However, if you want to scale your business, choose a UCaaS partner who will let you set your own prices and margins for the products. That way, you can change your pricing as needed to remain competitive and ensure profitability.

4. End-User Support

With any SaaS product, both resellers and vendors have a vested interest in creating long-term relationships with customers. That’s because you earn money through a subscription-based model.

As such, end-user support is critical. Your customers need to have 24/7 access to a support team, as well as easy access to technical support. Unless your company has the capability to provide around-the-clock support, it’s vital that you partner with a UCaaS vendor that can handle end-user support for you.

5. An Industry-Leading UCaaS Solution

To offer the best value to your customers, your partner needs to have a great product. For unified communications, here’s what you should look for:

Productivity features – the best unified communications platforms come with easy-to-use communication tools and a full suite of features that empower end-users to work securely, productively, and efficiently from anywhere.

Reliability – ideally, your UCaaS partner guarantees 99.999% uptime, which equates to less than six minutes of downtime for your customers a year.

Industry-leading security – look for a provider that’s compliant with PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and FINRA to ensure you can offer all your customers compliance assurance. You also should expect robust security features including:

• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• Backups of all data
• Mobile security, including remote device wipe and device timeout periods
• Device management enforces password requirements
• Password management rules based on the user’s role
• Infrastructure protection with enterprise-class firewalls and intrusion protection systems (IPS)
• DDoS (distributed denial of service) safeguards
• Incident response alerting and monitoring

Explore UCaaS Partnerships with Intermedia

As an Intermedia Partner, you can count on marketing and sales support, 24/7 end-user support, and the freedom to choose the customer relationship model with every sale. You’ll also be able to offer your customers one of the leading UCaaS products on the market.

Learn more about how you can grow your cloud business as an Intermedia Partner.

The Intermedia Team

Intermedia helps businesses of all sizes connect better – through voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, business email and productivity, file sharing and backup, security, archiving, and more – from wherever, whenever. And, as a partner-first company, Intermedia goes to work for our channel partners to help them grow their revenue and maximize their success.