Technology Reseller talks to Steven Try about new opportunities for Snom resellers and the company’s priorities for 2025
Earlier this year, Snom, developer of the world’s first commercially available SIP endpoint device, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the development of its first IP handset, surpassed
30 million euros in revenue and broke into new markets bringing additional opportunities for its UK resellers.
Despite its heritage, Snom UK&I Channel Manager Steven Try still sees the brand as something of a ‘best kept secret’, certainly in the UK, where it doesn’t have the market share it enjoys in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Its UK distributors, Provu Communications in Huddersfield and Electronic Frontier in Reading, provide sales, technical expertise and first line support (reseller partners can also raise tickets directly with Snom). However, much of the business development and lead generation activity is led by Try and his fellow UK&I Channel Manager Paul Grant.
“A big part of my job over the last three years has been to raise Snom’s profile. We can’t rely on distributors to do that because they don’t focus on just one brand – they have other products and other handsets to sell,” explains Try.
“When I do speak to people, I find they know the name, they know we’ve been around for a while, but may not always be completely up to date with our full product range.”
Such is his faith in the quality of Snom products that Try takes every opportunity to get devices into the hands of potential resellers and customers, confident that they will like what they see.
“We sell a tangible product, so
sending people a device that they can
test and get to know is the most effective route to market. Having the device on
your desk, comparing it to what you’re currently using is the only way to really test something. We’re confident that if people do that, they will buy from us and the
cost of that one device will pay for itself many times over.”
Key differentiators
The quality of its products is not Snom’s only selling point. Other differentiators include:
1 Branding opportunities.
Snom handsets (bar entry-level models) come with a small glass plate featuring the Snom logo that can be branded with a customer’s or reseller’s logo free of charge.
“Now we can go much further and actually manufacture handsets in the customer’s brand colour as well,” explains Try. “We can also create bespoke buttons, so if a reseller requires a specific function key on one of our handsets, rather than having it on a soft key, we can print their own keycap. That, again, is quite popular.”
2 Snom as-a-service.
Instead of paying for equipment upfront as a capital expense or entering into a traditional leasing agreement with a finance company, customers can pay a monthly rental for their devices.
“I don’t think we’ve made enough of this to date,” says Try. “We’re talking to a couple of large ITSPs and they are only interested in Snom as-a-service. People increasingly look at their comms, like their IT, as a monthly expense. When I was selling PBXs 20 years ago, people would budget years in advance to buy that hardware. If ITSPs that are already selling licences can change that capital expenditure to an operating expense and add £2/£3/£4/£5 to the licence cost per month (depending on the handset), the handset attachment rate, which has gone down since the pandemic, will start to go up again because customers won’t have to find the budget for hundreds
of handsets.”
3 European headquarters.
Snom was bought by Hong Kong-based Vtech Holdings in 2016, but the company, founded in Berlin in 1997, still sees itself as a European business.
“We’re headquartered in Germany and all our R&D, our provisioning server and our data is based in the EU and subject to EU data laws. That does have a certain amount of clout when it comes to specific verticals. If you’re dealing with government and the public sector, it might not be a deal breaker, but it certainly gets you that bit further,” says Try.
4 Manufacturing outside China.
Snom manufactures products in China, but it also has a manufacturing facility in Malaysia, enabling it to meet the needs of organisations that have strict rules about which countries they may or may not buy technology from. “That is a priority for some organisations, and we have won business that was about to be signed with a competitor because of it. I think sometimes it’s an irrational fear, but it’s good to have that choice in our portfolio, in case somebody insists on it.”
Vertical strength
To these four differentiators, Try adds an expanding product line that includes a variety of phones (deskphones, DECT phones, hospitality phones, conference phones), headsets, location and asset tracking solutions, announcement systems, IP desk phone terminals and accessories that are helping Snom and its resellers to address new markets.
“Demand for deskphones is certainly declining in offices where not everyone comes in every day. But Snom is very strong in sectors like healthcare, education, retail and logistics – all places that still need a device, perhaps not always to talk to the outside world but to communicate internally. In some cases, getting a message to a colleague on the shop floor as quickly as possible can be a matter of life or death, and you can’t rely on a mobile phone for that. With DECT technology, you have greater stability and greater security,” he says.
“If you’re strong in specific verticals that might not be totally immune to contraction but are always going to need communication devices, you are shielded a little from certain market trends. I think if you were entirely deskphone-oriented, you would struggle. But we have such a strong DECT portfolio that it has more than offset the decline in traditional deskphone sales.”
Today, cordless DECT solutions make up about 40% to 50% of Snom’s business. As an example, Try cites a six-figure contract recently won by one of its partners to roll-out a multi-cell DECT solution across the showrooms of a big UK car dealership.
New opportunities
Snom’s acquisiton by VTech has opened up other opportunities, notably in the hospitality market.
“VTech is very strong in hospitality, but their route to market is different to ours, so we asked to take on their hospitality range and sell that through our distribution channel and resellers,” explains Try.
“We launched the first product in that range at the beginning of this year and we’ve recently launched three or four new SIP devices, as well as a range of analogue devices – a new area for us.
Half of the devices in hospitality are still analogue because there is so much legacy cabling in hotels and especially in a hotel room the phone is just needed for simple phone calls. We were being excluded from opportunities because in buildings that were part structured cabling and part old wiring, we weren’t able to offer the same device for every room. By having an analogue phone that to the end user looks just like the IP version we can now do that. Orders are coming through regularly for hospitality handsets, and that’s a completely new market for us. It’s been a real success, not just in the UK but across EMEA.”
Try adds that while this has generated interest amongst new resellers, much of the business has come from existing resellers that might previously have met the needs of hospitality customers with devices from another vendor.
“A lot of resellers already had hotels as customers. It was just a question of making them aware that as well as using Snom phones for offices and front of house, they can now specify Snom for the hotel rooms too. Our distributors have played a big part in getting that marketing message out to partners.”
Specialist applications
Earlier this year (2024), Snom introduced another new product, the SP 800, with specialist applications in contact centres and home offices where users plug a headset directly into a PC or laptop running a softphone. Developed in response to a request from a reseller in Switzerland, this small box is designed to ensure high quality audio for businesses, in this case a bank, looking to connect employees via remote desktop infrastructure or a soft client through the cloud.
“Unusually for us, this is not a device for salespeople to go out and sell. It is something that you put in your proposal just in case the network that the customer says will be fine isn’t fine and they end up having call quality issues,” explains Try.
In the meantime, Snom is continuing to develop and expand its core IP phone offering:
a) to be more competitive – its recently launched D815 IP deskphone is 20% cheaper than the premium handset in the D7 series, even with its more modern design and built-in Wi-Fi; and
b) to ensure it has a product to meet customer expectations. In 2025, for example, Snom is planning to introduce a high-end deskphone with a large display and touchscreen.
Try’s priorities for 2025, as Snom brings out new products and addresses new markets, will, as ever, be to spread the word about Snom’s capabilities and the opportunities for resellers – and, most importantly, to get devices into people’s hands so they can experience Snom quality for themselves.
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