Message to UC Marketers and Sales

Dear Marketing and Sales for UC vendors everywhere,

I am writing today in a bid to help you avoid misnomers with your customers, although they don’t complain about it to your face they are in fact saying it to each other. Below are some of the ones I have encountered that later made me question the value of a product or person:

-Over use of the word “Unified”. Placing unified in front of every product you sell is not going to help you sell more stuff. The screw that holds the server rack in place is not a “Unified mounting device”.

-Distracting us with a competitors supposed downfalls because your own product is lacking in a product presentation. The fact is that your market research on your competitors product is more than likely incorrect or over exaggerated to the point it is never actually deployed the way you say it is, is just annoying.

-Use of the term “Best of Breed”. Unless you are selling me a horse this term is meaningless. Unless your product fits nicely in my environment and meets my cost expectations based on ROI the likely hood I will deploy because it is best of breed is zero. This term has passed its due date.

-Learning a new dial plan or product is not a reason not to go with the competitor’s product. We are IT pro’s and learning new systems and products is our job. If I didn’t want to learn new stuff I would be a bikini barrister (now that would be a sight).

-Don’t tell me, “Upgrading the OS or application on 50 servers is easy”. I have heard a similar sentence from a consultant who was lucky to be able to walk out of the room alive after he said it. In large enterprise environments where there is a different group controlling every piece of the collective IT environment anything beyond changing settings in an application can be considered time consuming and challenging. Application packaging and bundling for deployment can help a great deal but nowhere near close to easy.

So here ends my advice. Continue on in your endeavors but don’t say you haven’t been warned next time you use one of these on a customer.

VoipNorm