Over the years, we have accumulated some tidbits of good and bad practice when selling Asterisk-based systems. They are presented here for your consideration, but, as always, you should only use what is applicable to your situation and needs.
The practices you should use while selling Asterisk-based systems are as follows.
It goes without saying that you need to look smart (but not too smart as you are a consultant and not a sales person, remember!). Got an old car? Maybe you should consider parking it away from the customer and walk. Get there early, you can hang around the reception for 15 minutes and gather your thoughts.
It doesn't matter if you wowed the customer at the meeting, they're going to take time to think over your proposal. Nothing beats a nice brochure to look over later, which they can pass to colleagues.
Design a questionnaire sheet that you can fill out during the meeting. Customers like to think you're listening to them. It will also form the basis of your quote.
The customers like to think that their potential business is important to you. Make a habit of doing the quote as soon as you get back to the office while the information is still fresh. Have a standard email detailing the benefits, but unless it's really urgent, don't send it the same day unless requested. (Don't want to sound too desperate, do we?)
You might think that you've done such a superb pitch that the customer won't go anywhere else, but guess what... they're fickle. If your competition walks in a few days later, you may very well be forgotten. So you should call the customer three days later to confirm they got the quote and ask them if they have any more questions. Agree to call them back in a week if they're still not sure. Use your CRM system to put the calls in your diary and ensure you make them. That one follow-up call can make the difference between closing the deal and losing it.
Your initial contact at a company may be the IT department, which is fine, as at the very least it gives you the opportunity to alleviate any technical concerns up front and gives you the opportunity to gain their "buy in" to your system as a great solution. But you quickly need to establish if they have the authority to make a decision, and if not, who does. In smaller companies, this will probably be either the Managing Director or the Finance Director. It is to them that you will sell the operational benefits, and/or the cost savings.
If IT is not involved from the start, then you need to talk to them as early as possible in the process, as they will be heavily involved in the implementation of the solution and probably the ongoing management of it too.
Of course, there are some pitfalls that you should try to avoid too.
Asterisk-based systems are frequently installed, in part, to allow companies to more easily enable remote working practices. In other words, one of their switchboard operators could very easily be fielding calls from home. If you are starting out as an Asterisk consultant, wouldn't you use that same principle to allow you to work from a modest rented office? For a small monthly, fee you can rent one or more hosted servers that can run your PBX, web site, and CRM so that you can access them wherever you have Internet access.
Most of the time you will travel to customer sites, but if you need to host a meeting, there are many places where you can rent a meeting room by the hour.
You may not wish to divulge this setup to a prospective customer on your first visit old prejudices can die just as hard as old habits. However, if further down the line it becomes apparent, then there is no reason to deny it or even apologize for it. After all, you have proven that your system enables remote working in a means that is transparent to the caller.
Customers are happy to get a system at the lowest possible price, but when it stops working and they can't do business, everything goes out the window. A small monthly saving on line rental and call costs pales into insignificance if their phones are down for a day. Make sure you carefully point this out as tactfully as you can.
One example is with Internet circuit bandwidth. You might find that the customers don't want to separate voice and data traffic, as they claim to be light users who never approach their bandwidth limit. If that is the case, all well and good, but you need to make them aware of the consequences of their decision so that there is no comeback. Express your concern, and say "OK, but if the sound quality suffers, you'll need more bandwidth or VLANs, or QoS". Put your recommendations in writing; this way you're covered and the customer can't blame you.
There is an old saying:
turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash flow is king!
The simple fact is that, good as Asterisk is, it still needs some level of TLC. You need to factor in your ongoing support, so don't price yourself too low. To quote another cliché:
If your quote is too low, a customer will think it's too good to be true and you'll be unlikely to win the deal. More often than not, they'll go for the quote in the middle. That's where you want to be. However, you can alleviate some concerns about a low quote by being totally transparent about your pricing. If the customer sees that certain aspects of your system are considerably cheaper, such as the lack of software maintenance charges for instance, then they can be reassured that your installation and support services are not "cheap and nasty". Although, be careful as this requires your competitors to be similarly transparent, which may not be the case.
It's worth remembering that your customer can quite easily source handsets themselves, so stay aware of retail prices and resist the urge to boost your margin by overcharging for them. However, it is perfectly acceptable to add a transparent charge for assembly, and, if you are not auto-provisioning, a charge for installation as well, which will apply regardless of whether you supply the handsets.
In smaller companies, the traditional PBX has tended to be a plain metal box with a few vents, attached to the wall. Now you and I know that Asterisk runs on standard PC hardware, but it does not mean that you should turn up on a customer site with a PC under your arm to install as their new phone server. To your customer, a PC is something that sits on or under their desk, and every so often, causes them a lot of grief and frustration. You are not going to give them a "warm, fuzzy feeling" by sticking one in their server room (which so happens to double as a broom cupboard).
If you're selling to a range of customers, you need a range of server products. It is perfectly feasible to construct a rock-solid Asterisk box using server-quality components, and put it into a wall-mountable case with your logo on it. If you're smart, the same components will fit in a 1U or 2U rack-mount case too, and into a solid, floor-standing server case. Then you have three product lines where the only difference is the case. You can then introduce more options by changing the innards, so you may have entry-level, mid-range, and large systems aimed at different sizes of customer.
The reality, though, is that all but the smallest customer will require and expect a rack-mount chassis for their PBX. For these customers, it is usually better to utilize existing server lines from well-known providers such as IBM, HP, or Dell. Attempting to construct such a server yourself will not save you much money (if any), and you will not have a manufacturer's warranty for the system as a whole to fall back on.
If you decide you wish to construct your own PBX servers, in the long run, it is worth your while using good quality components, that is server-grade hardware. It is likely to increase significantly the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of the PBX as a whole (of course, this will be the same as the shortest MTBF of the components making up the system), and will also tend to give you longer warranties on the components. For instance, a typical consumer motherboard has a 12-month warranty, but the server-grade version of the same motherboard has a five-year warranty! Although, you may be constrained by the availability of server-grade motherboards in the right form-factor for systems aimed at very small businesses. In truth, this is a compromise that you will have to decide upon carefully.
For some installations, a simple wall-mountable case that holds a mini-ITX motherboard is appropriate. It's the size of a ream of A4 paper and, with the addition of a logo, certainly looks the part. Installing something like the VIA CN 1000 1 GHz Fanless (less moving parts, less likely to break) motherboard makes it an ideal Asterisk platform for up to 15 simultaneous calls.