Voip Unlimited Head of Sales Paul Gibbs tells Technology Reseller how the UC and connectivity wholesaler can help resellers win more business and protect margin
The words Paul Gibbs, Head of Sales at Voip Unlimited, uses to describe the wholesaler’s profile – terms like sleeping giant, awakening giant, challenger brand – give a clear indication of his ambitions for a company that he believes doesn’t have the market profile that its pedigree, achievements and product offering warrant.
“When I joined the business last year, I found that many people didn’t know who we were or what we did,” he explains. “The brand was out there, but people didn’t really know that we were a wholesaler in the channel. My challenge is to get that message across, to get resellers to understand what we can do and what products and services we have in our portfolio.”
As well as raising awareness of Voip Unlimited as a one-stop wholesale provider of voice, unified communications and network & connectivity products and services, including SIP trunks, Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, hosted telephony, a UC platform, FTTP, Ethernet leased lines and SOGEA, Gibbs is eager to explain what makes the company different and how it can help resellers win more business and protect their margins.
Technical expertise
Voip Unlimited was founded in 2006 by Managing Director Mark Pillow (see below), who made technical excellence one of the company’s core principles. Evidence of this extends from the build- out of its own Tier One IP network, which underpins the company’s product offering and ensures customers receive reliable voice quality and network performance,
to the ability of its tech teams to find bespoke solutions to customer challenges.
As Gibbs explains, this also has benefits for reseller partners.
“At our core, we’re a very technical business. We’ve built out our own network and that means that we can offer a set of products and services that are perhaps a bit different to what others offer or that let partners compete on slightly different terms.
“Commoditisation is now so widespread that resellers need a wholesale partner that can help them hang on to margin, so that if they have to reduce the price of one thing, they can increase it or get it back somewhere else. Having our own network and a management team that is incredibly technical allows us to shape our products based on what our partners are telling us.”
This also underlines the value of Voip Unlimited’s wide product offering and its ability to meet resellers’ evolving needs which, as Gibbs points out, often change from month to month.
“In January, SIP was flavour of the month. We signed some new resellers that migrated a huge number of SIP channels to us. One wanted to connect a big chunk of SIP channels to a borough council it had won as a customer. Another wanted to migrate from their current provider to us. The month before that we took on eight or nine resellers and all they wanted to talk about was hosted telephony and UC platforms.”
Connectivity a constant
The one constant, says Gibbs, is the need for connectivity, which is an additional opportunity for resellers at point of sale or when a customer’s existing contract comes to an end.
“We’re trying to ramp up the message that we’re a real challenger in connectivity. I don’t think many know that we can compete so aggressively in that space. We’ve chosen to work on aggressive margins for us, but to deliver that to our resellers so they can buy back margin that they’re losing through commoditisation in other areas.”
In addition to competitive pricing, which Gibbs describes as ‘really important’, Voip Unlimited is continuing to enhance its connectivity offering through interconnection partnerships with other network providers, including BT, Talk Talk, Cityfibre, Sky, Virgin and Colt and, most recently, Vorboss.
“We’re one of the first network providers to add Vorboss into our pricing tool, which means that our customers in London can now see if Vorboss is on net with them and price up and deliver those big bandwidth circuits – 10 Gig and upwards – to satisfy the thirst for bandwidth.”
By Q2, Voip Unlimited also plans to add SIM mobile connectivity to its offering. “It’s not something we’ve got in our connectivity portfolio right now. We do have a partnership with multiple network operators that enables us to sell mobile airtime to the channel, but where we think we can provide a differentiator is in the provision of more creative product and service bundles, things like Ethernet failover services based on 5G or site connectivity where traditional connectivity is unavailable.”
Reseller recruitment
In the meantime, Gibbs aims to continue to recruit more resellers, aided by an expanded sales team and growing awareness of Voip Unlimited’s product portfolio. This includes partners in other technology sectors, like IT and print, as well as those experienced in selling comms and connectivity.
“Some of our competitors spend a lot of time and money recruiting from the IT reseller market. And we’re also very successful in that arena because, guess what, they sell connectivity and they sell Microsoft Teams direct routing, just to a different customer base,” explains Gibbs.
He adds that while his main focus is onboarding new resellers, Voip Unlimited also operates a dealer model that enables service providers to add telephony, UC and connectivity to their portfolio to maximise wallet share and lock out potential rivals, with Voip Unlimited taking on responsibility for product/service delivery, billing and other elements of the customer relationship.
Whatever level of engagement a partner chooses, now is a time of great opportunity in telephony and connectivity, with everything from digital transformation and hybrid working to the fibre roll-out and ISDN switch-off shaping demand for reliable, secure communications. Voip Unlimited has the product and services offering to help you profit from this demand, whether you have a comms, IT or print background, as well as the technical expertise to meet your customers’ unique requirements.
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