What we do as comms resellers is pretty amazing! We work together to provide businesses with future-proof communications solutions. These solutions have the power to revolutionise industries and grow businesses, and by offering them to customers and end-users, we have become the catalysts of change, the drivers of transformation and ultimately the people who use their powers for good.
But we have a problem, and it comes in the form of jargon and acronyms that lie between us and our customers. Think about it, during a typical conversation or presentation, we make them wade through the murky waters of TLAs and pronounced acronyms like VOIP and UC or use acronyms like ISDN, SIP, FMC, Web RTC, BYOD, Hosted PBX, IP, PSTN, SCA, UCaaS, UCC, etc.
Did you start drifting off after reading the first few? You’re not alone, because that’s exactly what happens to your customers and prospects too. Customers who are gung-ho at the beginning of the conversation become overwhelmed and start wandering into dazed-and-confusedville. They stop asking questions, they stop making eye contact and might even say “no”, just to end the conversation.
If customers and prospects are not familiar with unified communications or subjected to talk of it on a regular basis, all the industry-wide jargon and acronyms are sure to befuddle them. Remember, our average customer is not a unified communications guru! They want to know how we can help them, and how our communications solutions can help strengthen their business, not mind-boggling words and phrases, or overly technical product descriptions.
We need more of the benefits and less of the jargon. We need to focus our efforts on keeping things simple. To do that, we need to go back and re-educate ourselves, but this time around, we need to do it at a more granular level. We need to get a better understanding of how everything works, because, in order to simplify technology, we need to get a deeper understanding of its inner workings.
If you can’t explain the services you provide to a six-year-old, it won’t work with customers or prospects. Let simplificationalism take centre-stage; explain product offerings in simple terms that your six-year-old self would’ve understood before you knew anything about the wonderful world of unified communications.
We need to make things relatable, and to do that, we need to start telling great stories. We should help customers and prospects see how the solution could work for them. We should trade in the overly technical talk for discussions about their business and how the solution will change things for the better. We need to drive this point further by giving them examples of similar businesses and the success they’ve achieved. So, remind yourself that simple is better the next time you meet a customer or a prospect.
Will Morey
