ADVERTORIAL
www.jabra.co.uk AUDIO POWER SETS AGENDA MARKET FOR UC-ENABLED AUDIO DEVICES HOTS UP AS HEADSETS COME IN FROM THE COLD
Comms resellers are well known for their speed of action and mind when identifying opportunities to grow their business, but in the headset department their opportunistic credentials appear to be plummeting as rapidly as the market for UC-optimised headsets is expanding. To illustrate the sales potential of UC-optimised headsets Jabra led a round table debate that captured the essence of UC and the opportunities that headsets place in the hands of resellers.
UC-optimised headsets should become a modus operandi of Dragon’s Den style slickness. After all, comprehending the market opportunity for headset sales in a unified communications environment hardly requires the IQ of Inspector Morse, yet headsets still keep resellers busy for just seconds every day. While showing a good grasp of doing profitable business, most resellers are strangely drawn away from selling headsets, even though UC- optimised audio devices are playing a central role on the communications stage, representing a unique and well-merited triumph for devices that were once deemed to be peripheral products.
F
A growing number of organisations are adopting unified communications which integrates email,
or resellers to recover their opportunistic equilibrium, selling
telephony, instant
messaging, voicemail and web conferencing in a single system. The two main drivers for UC adoption are the cost savings achieved by simplifying the communications infrastructure and the opportunity to boost employee productivity through more effective collaboration. Compared to using handsets, UC- optimised headsets enable staff to multi-task and access information faster. They help users to maximise the potential of UC and enable a greater degree of collaboration between teams.
Steve Tassell, UK UC Product Manager for Microsoft, noted: “The piece that’s missing in collaboration is being able to talk to people just as effectively as you can share information. Having that verbal communication as part of the overall collaboration strategy is absolutely vital. We can build a much
The users found that sound quality at both ends was vastly improved
28 COMMS DEALER OCTOBER 2010
richer collaboration story if we talk about data, content and voice in the same sentence. In the past, audio has been looked at separately from content. It’s about bringing those worlds together.”
User benefits There is a belief that football managers best motivate players by wildly shouting and waving their arms in the air. Although Karsten H. Pedersen, UK Managing Director for Jabra, has not yet resorted to this method as a strategy for getting resellers on side with headsets, he does enthusiastically flag up Jabra research that proves the many benefits of headset usage, such as improved sound quality. “We carried out a study in not-for-profit organisation where UC has been deployed,” he commented. “For a trial period we had different groups of people using headsets. The users found that sound quality at both ends was vastly improved, which uplifts the whole value perception of the voice solution. The trick is to get that knowledge included in the early discussions. That’s the
Karsten H. Pedersen: “In order to achieve the optimum value out of the solution you really need a tailored audio device.”
chance we have with our Jabra partners and alliance parties.”
Success on the audio device playing field is not for the leaden-footed, and talk of headsets being at the forefront of the sales process is a clear indication of how much things have changed, but there is still much prompting to do. “Unified comms is a big area and there are so many angles of approach, therefore a simple audio device is not perceived to be important,” added Pedersen. “In order to achieve the optimum value out of the solution you really need to have some kind of tailored audio device. It needs to be easy
to implement, simple to use and must be included early in the sales process.”
Leap of faith
Jabra’s JUMP profiling programme has been designed to propel UC- optimised headsets to the forefront of sales peoples’ minds. Kerri Smith, UC Sales Manager at Jabra, stated: “The objective with JUMP is to get customers thinking about headsets from the outset. When they have rolled out UC to 10,000 users it is much too late to suddenly be asking about the communications equipment needed when there is no budget left. So JUMP seeks to target end customers at the time of their pilot.”
To optimise your UC solutions contact 01784 220140 or email
ukpartner@gn.com www.jabra.co.uk
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