UC capabilities offer important opportunities for enterprises to address the need to reduce headcount, cut costs and lower capital budgets. We've seen lots of good examples about how that will happen, and there will be many more coming in the future.But we won't get there if people can't figure out what that value proposition is. And many of the current marketing messages aren't helping.
I'm continually bemused, and not a little dismayed, by the chameleon-like way suppliers use "UC" - making it fit into whatever marketing spin the supplier wants to give it. It's old news that many companies have seized upon UC, and then burnished and breathlessly rebranded their slightly tarnished offerings with this shiny-new-object label.
But wait. There's more. The thing that got me back on this tear was a postcard-like promo sent out by one of the major UC suppliers, encouraging people to view their executive's keynote address from VoiceCon San Francisco. The card features a UC-themed mantra: "Find. Reach. Collaborate. DONE." Nice summary.
But on the promo, they chose a stock photo which showed a bunch of people seated on folding chairs that are arranged theater style-They're just sitting there looking stage right, apparently at a horse race or wedding ceremony or something out of the picture. Huh? It's hardly a picture of collaboration!
C'mon, guys. Why not use pictures of groups clustered in their respective video-rooms continents apart from each other, or someone at an airport on a PDA accessing a portal to get current data for an upcoming meeting, or even bunch of people huddled around a table?
Here's another bad example. A campaign is about to launch by a supplier who, until recently, has shunned the siren call of UC. To show that it is busily catching up this supplier has decided to redefine "communication-enabled business processes" using its own terminology. At best, this change is only different, not better, and the supplier's choice of subtle distinctions, which, of course, emphasizes its own positioning and product set, does more to obfuscate, rather than to clarify, how UC helps enterprises in these troubled times.
Unfortunately, things get worse as you get farther from the home office. I was sitting in a client's conference room as the sales team from a major supplier was pitching their UC capabilities. The entire focus was parroting marketing messages about productivity enhancements for individuals using the UC tools. While such features are "nice to have," it's a challenging time to make them the sole basis of a solid business case. Even with gentle coaching, they were unaware of how their offerings could integrate communications to optimize processes to cut costs or improve revenues now.
In other situations, I've seen sales teams miss clear routes to a win by not understanding marketing's carefully designed partnerships with other suppliers. In one case, a team waltzed away from a sale by proposing a complex, costly implementation, rather than a simple solution that leveraged an established partner's gear already installed at the customer site.
Given this messy situation, I'd like to offer a few concrete suggestions:
1. Focus on UC's impacts. Stop "positioning." David Leach from Siemens said it well at last year's VoiceCon Orlando: "Let's stop talking about what UC is, and start talking about what UC does!"
2. Read the case studies. There are growing numbers of case studies on many suppliers' websites. While some stretch the bounds of UC, many offer excellent examples of the ways in which enterprises have gained real value. Add good examples to the pool, and adapt those to guide current opportunities.
3. Keep it simple. UC doesn't need to be about across-the-company implementations. Find a few excellent, fully-justifiable application opportunities and implement those. Then leverage that success to find more.
4. Understand today's business imperatives. Reduce headcount. Cut expenses. Curtail capex. UC has excellent ways to address each of these mandates.
Focus on them and win.
