Interested in selling VoIP and opening a new revenue stream in the high-margin hosted PBX and cloud UC market? Reinvent has got you covered.
If you’re a managed service provider (MSP) looking to expand your service offerings and add a new recurring revenue stream, look no further than reselling Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. The global VoIP services market is currently estimated to be at $158.72 billion in 2024, with projections to reach as much as $361.53 billion by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% from 2024 to 2031, according to a VoIP Services Market Analysis Research Report from Coherent Market Insights just published in July of 2024. That means there’s plenty of revenue growth opportunity for your MSP business to capture selling hosted VoIP.
What is a VoIP Reseller?
A VoIP reseller is a business that typically sells IT, communications, cybersecurity, networking, or other forms of managed services. It sells VoIP services from another provider to its portfolio of end customers. The VoIP reseller could source from a white-label provider and sell under their own brand name to their customers or resell from a known brand.
The VoIP reseller marks up the service offered by their VoIP service provider and makes further margins by providing additional services and value around the VoIP service. Traditionally, VoIP resellers may provide their own implementation/installation services of the VoIP system and offer white-glove levels of support that go above and beyond what most VoIP service providers offer, especially when competing in the small to medium business (SMB) markets.
For reference, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology that allows users of the VoIP system to make voice calls over the internet instead of using a traditional plain old telephone service (POTS) line. VoIP converts a user’s voice into a digital signal, which is then transmitted over the internet using packet switching. VoIP is useable on almost any internet-enabled device, such as computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets and VoIP phones.
How to Become a VoIP Reseller
“Getting in the phone business,” so to speak, is much easier than it used to be, partially because of the ability to become a VoIP reseller and offload the telephony infrastructure requirements to the VoIP service provider your business is reselling from.
Offering VoIP services directly, instead of through a VoIP service provider, would require your business to develop and manage all the necessary voice technology, which would encompass establishing secure servers, optimizing bandwidth, setting up hardware and software infrastructure, etc., all of which require a sizeable capital investment. While you can’t instantly become a VoIP services provider or a VoIP services reseller, it’s a substantially more straightforward undertaking to become a VoIP reseller.
Step 1: Develop an Understanding of VoIP & Telephony Services (If you don’t already.)
Selling and servicing VoIP requires your organization to have in-depth knowledge or experience dealing with networking, telecommunications, gateways, voice switches, SIP trunks and phone systems, to name a few key elements.
Some standard VoIP concepts to familiarize yourself with include:
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
- Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)
- Private Branch Exchange (PBX)
- Hosted VoIP
- Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
- Softswitch
- Bandwidth
- Latency
- Data Packets
Your staff will need to be capable of handling front-line support escalations and requests from your customers, so a technical understanding of VoIP to troubleshoot issues is vital. While you should be able to rely on your VoIP service provider to handle complicated support requests or complex deployments and to sell with and even sell for your company in certain instances, your employees need to be educated enough to deal with issues as they arise.
Step 2: Choose a White-Label Service Provider
The next step is to choose a VoIP service provider and, ideally, a white-label VoIP service provider. Why is a white-label provider so critical? You can sell a white-label service under your own brand, helping your customer associate you and your business with their service instead of the upstream provider. Plus, you’ll have actual control over your business as a white-label hosted PBX reseller, meaning:
- You can set your pricing and dictate your margins
- You own the customer, not the service provider, allowing you to build a recurring revenue business that you can sell at a later date for a multiple of EBITDA
- You control the customer experience (CX), including the sales process, service implementation and ongoing support, so that you’re not entrusting your critical and hard-won customer relationships to a third party
- You can make more margins, anywhere from 50% to 100% in profit, rather than 15% to 25% commissions in a traditional agent or referral model
Your chosen white-label service provider should help you by offloading backend technical requirements for your business, including:
- Operating softswitch technology and networks
- Back-office systems, processes and reporting
- STIR/SHAKEN, 911 and robocall compliance
- Compliance and tax remittance
- Billing under your company brand
- Customized marketing materials
Additionally, your white-label provider needs to make getting you in the market selling hosted VoIP as simple and frictionless as possible. Look for:
- No startup costs or capital investments are required on your part for telecom infrastructure
- No monthly fees or charges to be in their partner program
- No minimum revenue thresholds or quotas needed by your sales team
- No long-term agreements that lock you into a partnership that could be a bad fit
- There are no hidden costs and fees in the service providers’ pricing
- Anywhere from 50% to 100% profit margins depending on services and partnership model offered
Step 3: Identify Your Target Market
The next step is identifying your target market in order to sell your VoIP services. The strengths of the VoIP solution your white-label service provider offers will help inform this.
For instance, Reinvent Telecom’s hosted VoIP services tend to be the best fit for small to medium-sized businesses for the majority of our partners. There are more small to medium-sized businesses to service nationwide; there are around 33.2 million small businesses in America, accounting for 99.9% of all U.S.-based companies.
You may also find that a white-glove or personalized approach to sales and service to your local, regional community of small businesses within your state or collection of states (i.e., the New England area, the Pacific Northwest, etc.) helps you beat out the larger incumbent VoIP brands. In our experience, most small business customers are frustrated with the self-serve and inflexible options the enterprise VoIP providers offer. Tapping into the underserved SMB market is a sound strategy.
Step 4: Define Your Margins
Once you’ve established your target market, you’ll want to determine what you’ll charge for your VoIP services, factoring in research of the top brands and market shareholders in your service area. Take a look at the major competition and build a matrix on their offerings, including:
- Pricing (encompass annual, monthly and long-term contract options)
- Features
- Payment options
- Ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Quality of their VoIP service
- Quality of their customer service
Once you’ve set your margins and determined how you’ll compete with the existing competition, you’ll also want to see what other services you can wrap around your hosted VoIP services to help grow recurring revenue from your VoIP customer base.
Reinvent Telecom’s partners can offer a host of other communications solutions in addition to our white-label UCaaS, such as contact center as a service, call center, business messaging, virtual fax, standalone collaboration solutions, Microsoft Teams calling enablement solutions, SIP trunking and more.
Some of these solutions can create new accounts when they may be in long-term, three-year contracts with their existing VoIP provider. As you provide real-world business value to your customers through these other communications solutions, you can position yourself as a logical alternative to their existing VoIP provider when their contract term is up.
Step 5: Develop Your Sales & Marketing Strategies
Your white-label VoIP provider should have the resources in-house to help you with out-of-the-box marketing campaigns (email campaigns, social posts, sales cadences, videos, etc.), sales collateral (flyers, datasheets, battle cards, presentations, slicks, etc.) and web-based resources (knowledge base, partner portal, tutorial videos and websites) to give you a roadmap to sell your first hosted VoIP deal.
How Can Reinvent Help You Sell VoIP Solutions?
Reinvent is 100% wholesale and 100% invested in partner success. We don’t compete with our partners. Everything we do is designed to make it easier and more profitable for you to market, sell and deliver cloud communications services to your customers and prospects. Here are a few of the primary perks of how we support your VoIP sales efforts:
- Partner Sales Support – Reinvent offers sales quoting, proposal tools, and RFP assistance. Channel account managers are available to assist partners with customer sales calls. We offer monthly live sales training. We offer a free customer virtual demo service branded for your company. Our channel managers are here to help your sales teams succeed.
- Brandable Marketing – Reinvent offers partners branding collateral for its complete suite of cloud services. Additionally, Reinvent offers partner marketing playbooks, which are full customer-facing marketing campaigns comprised of email, social and video assets that are accessible and brandable from within Reinvent’s new partner relationship management portal, the Reinvent Resource Portal.
- Reinvent Partner Portal – The Reinvent Partner Portal (RPP) is a powerful business management platform that enables Reinvent’s reseller partners to centralize control of all aspects of their cloud communications business – from quoting services and order management to telephone number assignment and customer billing. Manage letters of authorization (LOAs), line number porting (LNP) and 911. Request a BAA when selling to a HIPAA-compliant organization. Plus, download SOC and compliance reports.
- Reinvent Resource Portal – Reinvent Telecom offers a Reinvent Resource Portal, where partners get brand-approved marketing materials to powerful CRM tools. Our partners can use customizable templates for collateral and access training modules for our solutions. Send email campaigns directly from the portal, brand your own data sheets, user guides and videos, or download assets for your marketing platforms.
- Reinvent University & Forum – In addition to live technical training, we offer access to Reinvent University, a full-featured learning management system (LMS) with a self-paced sales and technical training curriculum that can be accessed from desktop or mobile devices. Additionally, partners can engage in text conversations with each other and Reinvent’s subject matter experts via the Reinvent Forum inside Reinvent University.
Reinvent Telecom can help your business sell a plethora of over-the-top cloud communications services, including:
- White-Label Virtual Fax – Serve clients in regulated industries with faxing-as-a-service solutions, improving faxing’s strengths with tightened information security and eliminating manual processes for friction-free faxing.
- White-Label Hosted PBX – Hosted PBX is a future-proof “as a service” solution that offers your clients advanced, always-on communications while earning you reliable recurring revenue. Hosted PBX ensures flexibility, mobility, and scalability, all delivered through our highly resilient architecture.
- White-Label UCaaS – Modern businesses must communicate over multiple channels — voice, video, email, chat, text messaging and more. Deliver these capabilities in one app that is accessible anytime from any internet-enabled device with our unified communications as a service solution.
- White-Label Mobile & Desktop Apps – Your clients can augment their Hosted PBX experience with mobile capabilities that enable them to control and access their services from mobile devices for work anytime, anywhere.
- White-Label CCaaS & Contact Center – Our cloud contact center services help your clients deliver a better customer experience. We offer solutions tailored to enterprises, SMBs and small businesses so that all your clients can optimize their customer interactions in the new multichannel world.
- White-Label Business Messaging – Grow recurring revenue by offering a two-way SMS and MMS messaging service. This can be offered standalone or over the top of any service.
- White-Label Microsoft Teams Direct Routing – Capitalize on the growing use of Microsoft Teams by helping your business clients transform the popular collaboration application into an advanced business phone system with PSTN voice calling.
- White-Label Microsoft Teams Integration – For clients whose workflow centers around Teams but don’t want to rely on Microsoft for their phone system, we offer a solution that seamlessly integrates our enterprise-grade hosted PBX to their Microsoft Teams platform.
- White-Label Collaboration – Web-based collaboration solutions for online and video-enabled meetings and webinars have moved from nice-to-have to must-have. Add them to your portfolio as an easy add-on revenue stream.
- White-Label SIP Trunking – SIP Trunking, with unlimited calling nationwide, offers a flexible and lower-cost alternative to traditional services such as POTS lines and PRI. SIP Trunking delivers high-quality connections, plus optional features, such as call recording, reporting and business continuity.
Interested in Becoming a White-Label Partner?
We’d love to show you our portfolio of cloud communications services and how we can help you build your business and solve problems for your customers through our white-label telecom reseller program.
Not Ready to Become a White-Label Partner? Join Reinvent’s CoBranded Partner Program
Gain the benefits of being a cloud communications provider while turning over regulatory compliance, taxing and remittance, and billing to Reinvent’s experts. Set your own rates, keep 100% of the profit margins, and own the customer experience when you go to market under your own brand “powered by Reinvent”. Learn more here: https://reinventtelecom.com/partners/data-sheets/