By Scott Peterson, senior vice president of the Americas, Mitel

The cloud communications market is expected to increase by nearly 30% in the next five years according to Mordor Intelligence. For channel partners, there’s a unique opportunity to capture a bigger share with the right offering and approach. The journey to the cloud can be complex, and that’s where you come in.

Hybrid workforces are a catalyst to the anticipated growth. As your customers rethink how to empower their employees and customers, you can offer dual insight — both into business needs and the ins and outs of a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform. 

Reinventing reactive communications

Reacting to the pandemic, many companies cobbled together consumer-grade communications tools. Separate tools for calls, video, messaging, collaboration and file sharing made them efficient enough for the time. Over the long-term, however, this approach limits scale, creates security risks and in many cases, is becoming unproductive. 

Now they’re turning their attentions to the future, not only amending these deployments but also seeking opportunities to innovate, drive growth and improve employee engagement in the process. Forced agility is evolving to flexible continuity. The events of 2020 proved how important a communications platform is to business outcomes. It’s time to upgrade these temporary solutions into more permanent ones and customers need your help. 

Supporting business outcomes with UCaaS

You can steer them past the givens of a UCaaS platform — access, security and reliability — to focus on how the solution can drive results. While those factors are important of course, this more sophisticated and consultative strategy considers interoperability with other important applications. For example, every communication offers a chance to gain insight around the interaction, so CRM integration is important. 

On the heels of last year’s disruption, customers also realize they must continue to think ahead to emerging technology like new workspaces, AI and voice intelligence, which will raise collaboration, productivity and insights. By keeping up with market trends and evolving technology, you can better guide their vision. 

Becoming the business expert 

In today’s environment, the criticality of conversations between technology providers and customers has changed.  Because the business impact is more apparent, the timespan in which organizations make decisions has shrunk.

Oftentimes, the customer is hesitant to change solutions in the face of uncertainty or they realize the urgency and face pressure to decide quickly. With industry knowledge and technical competencies, partners have a unique opportunity to coach them to the solution that’s right for them faster than they could themselves.

As an IT/communications provider, if you can speak to not only the financial and operational benefits but the opportunities cloud solutions can offer when it comes to supporting agility and minimizing uncertainty, you’ll grab a bigger piece of the cloud market. Vendor partner programs should be the source for the experience you need. Ideally, they’ll include a balance between the supporting resources and control over your customer relationship. 

A good program should include training, marketing services, relevant content — all focused on upskilling and expanding your expertise and ultimately, recognizing and rewarding you for doing so. Programs that equip you to own the full customer lifecycle, from deal closing and migration to activation and troubleshooting also provide increased opportunities to leverage your consultation capabilities beyond just an initial sale to continue strengthening your relationships with your customers. 

The new MiCloud Connect Partner Managed program reaches these goals with resources, training, tools and incentives that reflect the state of the cloud market putting you in a great position to capture a bigger piece.