Collaborative solutions can truly help SMB customers improve their businesses. To make the sale, however, you'll need to identify specific pain points that the technology will address.

"Deployment of collaboration tools and services offers tremendous opportunity to improve business efficiency -- streamlining tasks, improving workflow, shortening project life cycles and improving customer interaction," says Irwin Lazar, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, an enterprise research and consulting firm.

Problem is, the technology building blocks include a complex mix of capabilities, including presence, VoIP, unified messaging, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, live conferencing, portals, document management, workflow, wikis, blogs and more. No wonder executives at SMBs may not intuitively see the connection between the bottom line and feature-rich solutions such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Novell Teaming + Conferencing, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, Cisco's WebEx service and the various platforms for unified communications (UC).

"Many customers come to us with a desire for making different parts of their businesses flow better, be more efficient," says Marc Potter, vice president of business development at Marvin Huffaker Consulting, a messaging and collaboration solution provider. "Our challenge is to help them understand how our solutions address their specific business needs." That means drilling down into business managers' pain points and making the case for specific collaboration tools. Nemertes Research has found that much of the demand is coming from the business side, as opposed to IT managers pushing tools to end users (see graphic).

The reward for such solution selling is a profitable practice that can generate considerable services revenue, as well as close and ongoing customer relationships. "Unlike increasingly commoditized hardware, collaboration solutions can be highly profitable," says Holly Garcia, senior director of vendor management at Ingram Micro. "Every solution needs to be customized, and once a basic package is in place, there's the potential for add-on sales and providing services such as remote management."

Virtual Efficiency
A key benefit of collaboration technology is helping distributed employees work together more effectively. "More than 80 percent of companies today consider themselves virtual, meaning they've got people working in different locations that are part of the same workgroup," says Lazar. "Collaboration solutions can help them communicate and collaborate more effectively regardless of their location."

Many solution providers themselves face this issue. Heartland Technology Solutions (HTS), for instance, is spread across eight offices in five states. This makes collaborative workspaces and effective communications essential to smooth operations. "Because we are multilocation, anything we do on paper is a disadvantage," says Jane Cage, COO at HTS. Instead, the company uses Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as a portal and intranet to document and automate numerous company processes. (For more details, see "Delivering Quality Services")

For real-time collaboration, HTS works from a Microsoft Live Meeting server integrated with unified communications. Weekly management conferences are linked to Outlook calendars and a common agenda and meeting workspace. "When I think of something that needs to be brought up, I add it to the agenda of that meeting workspace," says Cage. "We also use the workspace to store documents, so we don't have to e-mail them around." Managers absent from such meetings can get up to speed by reading the minutes entered into each agenda item. (HTS, by the way, uses its own applications to showcase the technology to prospects.)

Online meetings can also reduce travel expenses and help protect the planet. According to Nemertes, distributed companies that used videoconferencing reduced their need for in-person meetings from four annually to one -- a welcome option in this era of high energy costs and global warming.

Better Customer Service
Customer service and the sales process can benefit from collaboration enabled by unified communications. Nemertes calls this "just-in-time-fetch-the-expert" -- employees use presence to quickly locate experts and get them to join an ongoing call or conference. The payoff is improved customer service and higher sales close rates.

That has proved true at New Vision Communications, a Nortel and Microsoft solution provider that has implemented UC in-house. "With presence and IM, if I'm talking to a customer and have a question about something, I can see who's available, shoot them an IM while I'm talking and get an instant reply back," says Jerry Olson, president of New Vision. "That enhances customer service and my productivity."

Virtual collaboration and online meetings can enhance the sales process in other ways as well. Conferencing can improve productivity by replacing inperson calls with online sales meetings. And sales presentations can be archived for on-demand retrieval by prospects and customers, a boon to overtaxed sales staff. Imagine the time, effort and expense required to give dozens or hundreds of live sales presentations, compared with the efficiency of on-demand retrieval over the web.

Besides assisting in the horizontal sales function, online conferencing can be useful in many vertical markets, according to Anna Saita, editorial director of Larstan Business Reports. Examples include distance learning in education, "telemedicine" in healthcare, "telejustice" in the legal profession, webinars in the financial industry and, of course, training in information technology.

At Marvin Huffaker Consulting, customers often express frustration with their primary collaboration tools -- standalone e-mail, telephone and IM -- and with the limitations of e-mail chains for content management and workflow. The solution, according to Potter, is unifying the messaging system with advanced collaboration and conferencing tools, as provided by applications from IBM, Microsoft, Novell and others.

"An enterprise-class messaging system can be integrated with other critical business systems and collaboration tools, allowing users to share ideas, collaborate on documents, hold quick meetings and manage their business processes," says Potter. "It also can be linked to mobile devices and VoIP for unified communications and can assist in secure data management."

Potter adds: "That is the future of collaboration -- a full end-to-end system for messaging, collaboration, portals and workflow that gives users a single place to work from. The impact on productivity can be substantial." He also notes the appeal of social networking (Web 2.0) tools such as wikis, blogs and real-time chat. Younger employees who have grown up using this technology expect it in the workplace.

Ingram Micro Can Help
Sound like a business you'd like to pursue? Ingram Micro has a rich line card of collaboration solutions, as well as extensive training and support resources. For more information, Ingram Micro's customers can contact their sales representative.