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Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Voicemail

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Continuing our series that spotlights fellow Exchange partners who are spotlighting the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your businesses, this edition focuses on Voicemail.

Voicemail (a/k/a Voicemail with Exchange Unified Messaging) can truly save your customers both money and time, and perhaps more importantly, save them from that aging, legacy hardware solution they have today for voicemail.  You know the one; the one that may be from a vendor that no longer even exists!

To further support this point, we know from some fairly recent research from folks like the "Voice Report”, over 50% of customers will need to replace their primary PBX before the year 2014. What does this means for your business? Easy. There’s not only an opportunity to position a solution like Lync, but also swoop in and win the voicemail socket with Exchange!

But, PBX replacement time doesn’t need to be the only compelling event that can drive a good conversation about Voicemail with Exchange. We’ve found in a number of cases that partners are just making the deployment of Exchange-powered Voicemail a default aspect of any SOW they pitch to customers.  Basically, they are saying that every customer should think of a well planned, designed and deployed Exchange 2010 solution includes Voicemail, and this has not only been a very successful upsell opportunity, they have also witness cases where a Lync deployment was a natural pull through.

Voicemail: the gift that can keep on giving!

As with other “Spotlight” posts, you don’t just have to take my word for it! 

Here’s what partners like The VIA Group have to say about tapping into these additional services opportunities:

Lync phone in background"Microsoft's unified messaging capability inherent in Exchange 2010 is such a natural fit for The VIA Group and the services we deliver to our clients. VIA was one of the very first system integrators worldwide to embrace third party unified messaging technologies for Exchange 5.5 in the mid 1990's and over the past 14 years, we have delivered millions of unified messaging mailboxes to our clients. When Microsoft first introduced its own unified messaging functionality with the release of Exchange 2007, we were very excited! Since then, VIA has become experts with Exchange UM on-premises as well as Exchange UM online with Office 365. Exchange 2010 has become a big part of our services delivery for our clients and specifically with our deep knowledge around these technologies, we are able to seamlessly integrate Lync and other telephony manufactures systems with the robust capabilities that both the on-premises and Office3 65 versions of Exchange 2010 UM deliver for our customers."

- Kevin Carswell, CEO The VIA Group

So what’s next?

  • Use Exchange Voicemail to run your business.  Nothing is cooler to demo to a customer than a real-time text preview of a message you just left yourself.  This is always a staple of my customer pitches and should be in your sellers’ arsenal as well!
  • Deploy what your customers might already have the rights to.  No kidding!  There are many customers that have the software and license rights via the Exchange ECAL, but need you to go and deploy it.  This is why the “Voicemail included by default” technique for SOWs is a winner.  And, just ask partners like Dimension Data’s Brian Walshe who has one of my most favorite quotes of all time, saying with Exchange voicemail “your ROI on [Unified Messaging] is probably six weeks. It’s ridiculously good. ”
  • Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.

Are you seeing great opportunities to with Exchange Voicemail?

Post a comment and share!

Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing