So, you made the smart move and now you’re going to sell the best quality VoIP phone service alongside your core offerings or maybe you want only to sell VoIP services. Your VoIP provider platform is chosen and you’re ready to start pricing your services. They gave you suggestions, but you decided to look at the websites of your other small business VoIP competitors and base your pricing against some of the lower priced VoIP providers. Stop, you may want to rethink that.
Since the dawn of sales, there have been two types of VoIP selling strategies. You either sell on price or your company product/service advantages. We all tend to get caught up on pricing, it’s human nature. It is also very easy to make low prices to get sales activity, but is this really the type of activity we want and will serve us long term? In some businesses, it is exactly what you need to do. In VoIP telephone and communications services, it is not a wise path unless you acquire venture funding with a specific long-term goal of taking over the world. For the majority of us, we have to live in the real world under our own organic growth when starting new.
So why should you avoid the lowest price approach to obtaining customers and growing your VoIP business? There are several reasons that come to mind:
- Matching or beating the lowest advertised price from a large or small VoIP competitor – This is never a good strategy. The Internet is littered with VoIP providers selling their service or marketing deceptively at prices no provider can make money at. Believe it or not, there are many people running businesses that don’t know what they’re doing and do not understand the overall related costs of their businesses. That is why 9 out of 10 businesses, in general, fail in the first year. Why would you want to follow that model?
- Lowest price customer types – When you advertise based on the lowest price, you will mostly attract customers that only care about price. They are typically ignorant of the value and long-term benefits of one company over another. They are typically impulsive and not long after signing up for your VoIP service will see a lower price from another competitor and switch. Running a business on churn is painful, unstable, time intensive and produces low margins.
- Lack of profit to grow your business – Though it may seem low priced sales volume will mean more profit to grow the business, that day never comes because your sales become erratic and unpredictable. Some days you have more customers leaving than signing up due to the type of customer gravitating toward your lowest priced model.
- Increased technical support issues – The customers who look for the lowest price simply produce more technical support issues and requests for your VoIP service. If a customer is not willing to do some in-depth research to find a good company, how likely are they to spend any of their own time to understand VoIP Phone features or ever look at their own company network? You will always spend more time supporting these types of customers.
- Ability to sell your VoIP service is reduced – With all the listed issues above, your time or your sales staff time will see a reduction in time to actually sell your service dealing with all of the issues surrounding this type of customer which you have now increased dramatically by marketing directly to them.
- Social media backlash – This same type of customer is more likely to write a bad review or leave negative feedback on social media which diminishes your chances for obtaining new customers, especially the customers you really want.
What is the alternative approach you ask? Basing your marketing and sales strategy on a company’s strengths and advantages is the harder path in the beginning and long-term it will bring you the type of customers you really want for success. It requires that you take a hard look at what makes you and your VoIP service different from low-cost providers. Do you want to be the best quality VoIP provider? It also requires that you educate your customers to these differences and not let them make assumptions. For others, it requires being creative by visiting a new prospect in person and bringing a live demonstration phone so they can hear the quality or see features. These days, small to midsize companies prefer local VoIP providers over big box providers, but how would they know you’re the right choice when all they see is a low price? How would they know you are a high-quality VoIP service provider? After all that is taken into consideration, when you present yourself correctly, educate your customers, know your service and add value, the issue of pricing is much less important and your future customers are far more likely to pay more without any or little resistance. Put yourself in the position of your customer that you really would like to have. They don’t want to have their phone service down, have poor voice quality or subpar technical support, but that is the outcome of a lowest price VoIP provider. So, get out there and let the customer know that!
Talking Platforms can help you sell that VoIP service with ease and beat out your other small business VoIP competitors. Contact us at (202) 747-0064 to sign up for our white label phone service. We also offer a full-service model that includes end-user support.