How to sell unified communications in hard times

John Hart, senior vice president of business development and marketing at Intelepeer, also sees small to mid-sized businesses looking more closely at Web 2.0-type approaches to improve their sales and marketing strategies.

“In a down economy where there’s need for more creative ways of reaching customers, they are turning more to Web 2.0 and adding to that voice enablement on those enterprise applications,” Hart said. “They are not investing in capital, but they are looking for new ways to expand their application suite.”

Intelepeer’s approach is to “voice-enable” existing applications such as CRM systems so that small to mid-sized businesses can use them in new ways.

“Say I have 25 calls I need to make,” Hart said. “Instead of dialing them individually, I can do a voice blast that says something like, ‘Hey, this is John Hart, and we’ve just lowered your costs by 10%. Press one to reach me.’ When they receive the call, they can hit 1 and be bridged to me. Or they can dial me, and I can select incoming calls preferentially by ranking. The system will stratify those incoming calls to me.”

Similarly retailers can announce sales to their regular customers, Hart said.