Before you even think of hitting the market, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself. Top of that list is the most important one—Do you truly "believe" in your product? In other words, are you absolutely certain that when you install your system, not only will it do everything the customer's previous system did, but also actually offer them extra functionality and a commercial advantage over competitors who do not have your telephony system? If you do not have this belief, then you need to understand the fine detail of what your system can do in order to give it to you, because if you go to a potential customer and the questions start getting tough, only this absolute belief based on demonstrable facts will see you through.
However, you have just learned how to construct a high-quality, extremely-stable telephony platform with excellent functionality, and through its open source nature, the ability to seriously undercut the price of commercial offerings and still make you a profit, so why wouldn't you be confident?
So now you're fired up about Asterisk and its capabilities and possibilities, but how do you go about selling it to potential customers? Again, before you hit the market, you need to accept that in order to be successful, not only do you have to provide one or more Asterisk servers and a bunch of handsets, but you also need to ensure that the ancillary aspects to any telephony system meet certain required standards if the installation must achieve the customer's goals. Items such as the LAN, WAN, and Internet connectivity need to be of a certain standard, possibly using VLANs and/or QoS to ensure voice quality. The environment the server will reside in should be secure, clean, and air-conditioned, with power failover in many cases. The customer may wish to implement some or all of these aspects themselves, but you will need a mechanism for determining the minimum standard of each, and of allocating responsibility fairly once the system and maintenance agreement is in place. You should also be prepared to provide any or all of the prerequisites if you are asked to do so, which may mean having agreements in place with companies who can do a job to the required standard, if you do not wish to do it yourself.
Now you're ready to hit the market, so let's have a look at why potential customers may consider a new telephone system. For 99% of the time that you speak to a customer, the main reason that they are considering a change is that they've heard VoIP will save them money on their calls. However, a little probing will often reveal that this is not the sole reason. Looking at the SME market primarily, you may well find secondary drivers such as:
Issues with the current telco's service: These include issues such as taking hours or even days to sort out any problem no matter how small.
Cost of adding new phones: With traditional twisted pair telephony, adding a new phone or moving an existing one can be expensive. While people have become used to running CAT5 cable, twisted pair cables seems like black magic still.
Number portability: The customer is moving to a new location and wants to retain their number.
Maintenance costs: A lot of telephone companies derive a huge amount of their income from maintenance fees. These can be considerable and are often overlooked by the customer.
Flexibility: Most traditional systems "can" be quite flexible, but often a specialist engineer is required to access the system remotely, or even physically, and enter obscure codes, simply to change something as simple as ring patterns. The charges made for this often deter the customer from requesting changes that would benefit their business.
These drivers cover most of the reasons that most customers consider changing their phone system. However, there may well be other reasons a change is being considered—for instance, an office move often prompts consideration of telephony requirements. The relative priority of the drivers will vary depending on other factors, an obvious example being the financial climate at that point in time. If you want to be successful in targeting your product accurately, it is important that you understand which drivers are most important to your target market when you are contacting them.
If you were to have a discussion with some people about the USP (Unique Selling Point) of modern IP-capable PBX’s, the majority are likely to mention that it is the ability to make cheap calls. But, often this is not the case. It is becoming more usual for telcos to offer bundles or even flat-rate pricing for PSTN calls, along the lines of the charging strategies in the mobile/cell market. As a result the cost difference between PSTN and VoIP calls is diminishing, sometimes to the point where huge volumes of calls are needed to make a compelling case for change when only call costs are considered.
However, in the SME market, significant cost savings can be made simply by reducing the number of PSTN lines on which a company needs to pay rental. Remember, line rental is paid whether or not any calls are made over the line. In addition, it's not unusual for customers to be locked into minimum contract terms, some as long as seven years! This may save some money on installation charges, but that saving is completely outweighed by the cost of line rental over that period, particularly if one or two years into the contract a means of reducing the number of lines required is found. If you have a potential customer in that situation, they will need to have a frank discussion with their line provider about early exit from the contract, and the cost of that will need to be factored into the ROI calculations.
To illustrate the potential line rental savings, consider a hypothetical dispatch company. They have five lines so that they can deal with multiple calls at certain times of the day. These lines are really busy from 7 am to 9 am while they deal with deliveries, and busy again from 3 pm to 5 pm while they deal with pickups. The rest of the time, there's probably hardly a call, but they're paying for the five lines 24/7. If you can approach that company and say, "Guess what, you can do away with four lines permanently, do you think they're going to be interested?" Of course they are, because by eliminating line rental, you're disposing of a significant fixed cost.
So you can see that, when selling the potential to save money to a prospective customer, it's not as simple as telling them that they'll save a certain amount on all their calls. Depending on the company's call volumes, it's possible that the ongoing line rental savings will be the major cost benefit, and to quantify that you will need to know how many lines they have now and how those lines are used. You can then put together a proposal illustrating how many lines the new system will need, with associated reduction in line rental charges, and how their call profile will be represented using VoIP where appropriate. If this also results in significant cost savings, then it's even better.
A word of caution, though—all of the major telcos are reducing their call charges. It's becoming a downward spiral. You, or your chosen ITSP, cannot hope to compete on a cost per minute with a telco with millions in the war chest. Indeed, it is the current consensus that call charges will disappear completely in the next few years to be replaced by bundled minutes. It would not be wise to make long-term call cost savings the cornerstone of any proposal you put forward.