6 Strategies for Success as a UCaaS Reseller

Serving your customers well and nurturing relationships lead to long-term customers and profitability for managed service providers (MSPs). To achieve these goals, you also need a high-quality and robust solution from a trusted provider. How can you hit all these points as a UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) reseller? The right strategy for success will allow you to reach your goals. By following it, you can also add value to your customer’s technology stack.

In this post, we’ll share those must-have ingredients for success as a UCaaS reseller.

Why Become a UCaaS Reseller?

MSPs and other IT consulting companies can position themselves well by becoming a UCaaS reseller. The features of such a platform are in hot demand right now, and most companies are still hobbling together different pieces—a chat feature here, video calls on another app, and VoIP (voice over IP) on a third platform.

With UCaaS, it’s turnkey and all in one hub. If you present that to your audience, you could see a lot of new business. It’s a segment of software that’s growing tremendously. Its expected growth is 23.6 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) from 2021 to 2028. The market’s value in 2020 was $38.74 billion.

It’s expanding, not contracting as some IT services. Thus, to stay competitive and meet customers’ changing needs, UCaaS is a solution you want to offer. Finding success requires connecting lots of dots. You’ll need the right partner, control over customer relationships, and the ability to boost your bottom line.

Choosing a Quality Solution

There are many elements to discuss regarding becoming a UCaaS provider and growing your business. First, you need to be sure the solution is high-quality, secure, and reliable. Most UCaaS systems have the same features, but not all deliver on those attributes. Test out the solution as a way to gauge its quality, security, and reliability.

You should also ask:

  • How do you encrypt data?
  • Do you meet or exceed compliance with regulations like HIPAA and PCI-DSS?
  • What is your uptime SLA (service level agreement)?
  • How else do you get data and information safe on the cloud?

If you get answers to these questions that put you at ease, you can be just as confident to offer it to your customers.

Finding the Right Reseller Model

First and foremost, you need to ensure the right reseller structure. You want to own the relationship with the client still, so you’re looking for a UCaaS partner, not a purely transactional model.

Owning the customer relationship means you are responsible for billing, bundling, support, and all other elements. In most cases, you can white label the platform or co-brand it. It’s still you and your business serving the customer in every way. Now, you have a robust UCaaS solution, providing feature-rich options to support your efforts.

Setting Your Own Margins

In many reseller options, the provider sets the prices with no room for adjustment. That could impact your ability to be competitive or profitable. The best option is to buy at wholesale from the provider, then charge the cost you choose. It gives you more flexibility around margins, so you can create pricing tiers that offer value to customers while also being a revenue generator for you.

Margins can be tight in any service model. Knowing you have more control over this makes it easier to move forward with a partner.

Creating a Sustainable Support System

If you own the relationship, you’re also the help desk for clients in many ways. Managing this aspect can be challenging, depending on bandwidth and platform expertise. Find a model that gives you support when you need it, so you can better help your customers. Having an on-demand channel to tap into from your provider can boost your support capabilities.

Branding Your Way

Being able to white label a product suite can be very effective for building trust with your customers. It illustrates a level of expertise and keeps the focus on your brand. You also don’t have to be an expert on the software when you have marketing materials and sales assistance from your provider. Those key components give your team an advantage when you go to market with the solution.

This approach is very attractive for established brands. If you have good recognition in your region, new and existing customers will see this as an upgrade to your solutions.

Avoiding Lock-Ins

One concern many MSPs have is being locked-in to one vendor. While a single provider offers ease of deployment and organization, it’s normal to be nervous. You may think there are no options outside of this traditional model. That’s not so; UCaaS partners can allow for a month-to-month agreement.

Such an arrangement allows you to mitigate risks associated with one provider and a long-term contract. It also demonstrates that the vendor is always trying to win your business every month. It enables a reciprocal business partnership, where all parties are earning value.

Finding Success as a UCaaS Reseller

The last year has seen a faster adoption to cloud communications than ever before. Companies are becoming more aware of how they need to organize communication and collaboration. To be the right fit for them, you need a quality platform and a partnership with a provider that delivers value to all.

(Originally published in the Intermedia Blog and authored by Kirsten Barta.)