Traditional telecom billing would never be considered “sexy”, but when has Versature ever been associated with anything traditional?

Yes, you read that right. Versature’s billing is sexy and it knows it.

Over the past few months Versature staff have been working hard at implementing a new cloud-based billing system that can keep up with our meteoric growth. I’m happy to tell you that as of today, it is online and ready to process invoices and transactions. All Versature bills from this point forward will be generated by the new billing system. 

We’ve always prided ourselves on the look of our invoices and the transparency and accuracy of the charges. I’ve never heard of a customer that was happy to receive a bill, but if the charges are well laid out and make sense, they are more inclined to gladly pay for services rendered.

So why do we think our billing is sexy? There are tons of advantages to this new cloud-based billing platform, but I’m just going to give you the highlights :

• Changes to billing are made immediately, and our staff see changes in real-time.
• Our front-line staff have unprecedented access to invoices, plans, charges, and changes. Our customer service experience should be even better now.
• Integrated with Salesforce so we have one place to look for everything.
• Pro-rated billing capabilities (mid-month start dates and more accurate billing periods).
• Automated reminders for things like credit card expirations.
• Compared to our manual billing process that we’ve used to this point, our billing will be much more timely.
• 3 and 5 year contract options are now on the table, allowing customers to receive a discount in return for committing to a fixed term.

There will be small differences between the format of bills generated last month and bills being generated on the 1st of May. If you have any questions about the invoice format, or have a question or concern about charges that appear on your bill, please contact us immediately. While we strive for perfection, there may be a mistake or two caused by the transition.

April 26, 2013 – Ottawa, ON : Versature, a leading provider of cloud-based phone service for Business in Canada, announced that it was named to the Ottawa Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Companies list at yesterday’s Awards Ceremony at the Ottawa Marriott Hotel.

It’s been quite the year for Ottawa-based Versature, being named as a Startup-to-Watch in early 2012, winning Small Business of the Year from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce in the fall, and now being honored as one of the fastest growing companies in Ottawa.  Accolades continue to follow this company that had been flying under the radar for quite some time, having recently turned 10 years old.

“We are delighted with this recognition from the Ottawa Business Journal,” said Paul Emond, President of Versature.  “To be named to this year’s list, with 9 other amazing Ottawa-based companies that we hold in high regard, quite frankly is humbling.”

Just this week, Versature announced a partnership with Counterpath Corp. to provide “Versature Mobility”, a fully supported hosted softphone offering that works across a wide range of devices including iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.

Versature provides next generation Hosted Phone systems (Hosted PBX) for businesses in Canada. Versature’s Hosted PBX and Mobility products are ideal for businesses in transition – whether they are moving, growing, contracting, or just fed up with the status quo provided by the major telcos.

Here is a link to the OBJ profile on Versature : bit.ly/101IXu6

For more information :

“Versature Mobility” is a new offering from Versature that includes :

• No upfront software license costs
• No-cost automatic upgrades
• Bria softphone is remotely configurable by Versature technicians
• Low cost monthly fee added to your Versature bill

“As a result of the remote configuration capabilities built-in to this new hosted offering, we will finally be in a position to provide the same level of remote support and configuration that we have provided for desktop phones.” said Paul Emond, President of Versature. “We’re excited to provide this functionality to our customers – fully supported mobility products will most definitely enhance their Versature communications experience.”

Pricing for Versature Mobility is :

1. Mobile (iPhone/Android) – $1.35/month/extension
2. Tablet (iPad) – $1.80/month/extension
3. Desktop (Windows/Mac) – $3.00/month/extension

Check out this video for an explanation of what Versature Mobility can do for you :

Versature provides Hosted Phone systems (Hosted PBX) for businesses in Canada. Versature’s Hosted PBX and Mobility products are ideal for businesses in transition – whether they are moving, growing, contracting, or just fed up with the status quo provided by the major telcos. Versature was named as a “Startup to Watch” in early 2012, won “Small Business of the Year” at the OBAA’s in the fall of 2012, and were just recently named as one of the fastest growing companies in Ottawa by the Ottawa Business Journal.

Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, CounterPath Corporation is an award-winning provider of desktop and mobile VoIP software solutions.

Interested in adding Versature Mobility to your existing Versature bundle? Go ahead and give sales a call by dialling 611 on any Versature phone, sending an email, or calling us toll free at 1-877-498-3772.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation variables

Recently we had a company ask us about supplying Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations over a 5 year period.  They were considering both premise-based and Hosted PBX options, and were having difficulties creating a model which would allow them to compare the two in an apples-to-apples fashion.  There are a number of semi-hidden costs when you go with a premise-based solution that need to be accounted for in a TCO model, and in response we created an Excel spreadsheet for them to capture that information.

Here is our model based on 20 seats.  As the number of seats go up, the monthly per-user cost for Hosted PBX goes down, so if you are looking at >50, >200 or >1000 seats it would make sense to contact us to make sure you get volume pricing information.  Also, the cost of the premise-based PBX goes up substantially as you add users.  Again, if you are looking for information on this we can provide ballpark pricing that we’ve received in our competitive analysis.

Without further ado, here is the model :

Total Cost of Ownership Model for Hosted PBX vs. Premise-based PBX

Click on the image for a larger view.  If you’d like this spreadsheet emailed to you so that you can make your own modifications to the model, just email our Sales department.

Some of the key take-aways are the cost of software upgrades and maintenance for premise-based systems that are not often made available to you up-front.  That’s usually a post-sales follow-up surprise.  Also, remember that Hosted PBX completely replaces the need for your telco (ie: Bell Canada, Telus, Rogers, etc…).  The bill you currently have for lines from one of those companies will be completely replaced by your Cloud-based PBX provider (ie: Versature).

Lastly, this model assumes a VoIP enabled Premise-based PBX.  If it is an analog system, then the costs go even higher for moves/adds/changes and maintenance.  If you are currently on Centrex from your telco, then the TCO is even more compelling and we need to talk ASAP.

The industry is changing very quickly.  Everything IT and Telecom related are moving to the cloud.  You wouldn’t consider hosting your own website or CRM system on premise, would you?  The substantial one-time costs, hassles, ongoing maintenance, required upgrades and security concerns of premise-based PBXs make for a very compelling case for Hosted PBX.

Cloud-based Digital Signatures are the future.

Our sales process is not unique. We provide a quote to our potential customer, they review it and make a “go/no go” decision, and then get the paperwork back to us so that we can begin our work. There are many industries that work this way.

Up until recently, we would generate PDF quotes and send them out for signature, asking that the potential customer print them out, sign them, and return them by fax or scan and email them. We identified this as a bottleneck, as it was often taking days and weeks from the time that we sent the final quote to when we got the signed quote back, with no visibility for us to know what was happening during that time. Were they having second thoughts? Was it difficult to get the right signature? Was it a pain to print, sign and scan and it was just being put off? In a large number of cases, it seems it was the latter as moving to a digital signature process has drastically improved our quote return times. We have gone from a median of 3 days return time to :

• 25% of quotes signed in less than 1 hour
• Average length of time to sign : 3 hours

It’s a small sample size, since we’ve only been using digital signatures for a couple of months, but wow! Going from days to hours, with full visibility as to when the prospect opened the document, who it’s been forwarded to, and when it has been signed is amazing. The fact that it’s integrated with Salesforce and automatically populates the opportunity with the signed contract is a great time saver and eliminates human error.

We went with DocuSign but there are a number of competing products on the market including EchoSign (recently purchased by Adobe) and HelloSign.

UPDATE: After a horrendous customer service experience with DocuSign, 
we have cancelled our account and are moving to a different provider.

It’s takes some integration work to get these products incorporated into your workflow, but we have found it to be an outstanding improvement to our sales process. Yay Cloud!

Paul Emond - President, CEO

Paul Emond is a serial entrepreneur with a technology focus. A past company was recognized as one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada, and more recently Versature was honoured with the “Small Business of the Year” award from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

Marketing – Track, Analyze, Re-Focus Your Efforts, Repeat.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this quote, which goes “Half of my marketing dollars are wasted, if only I knew which half!”.

We’ve definitely been guilty in the past of taking a shotgun approach to marketing, which I don’t think is uncommon in small business. As we grow and we take a more systematic approach to everything we do, it fell to me to review and optimize one of the larger budgets that we have after salaries. To say I went into it kicking and screaming would definitely be an understatement, as my background is mostly centered around technology. It turns out, after spending considerable time learning about inbound and outbound marketing techniques, social media, SEO, and Adwords-based search marketing, I’ve come to the conclusion that in this day and age it takes a really good techie to be a really good marketer.

Here are some of the things that I have been working on (some complete, some still a work in progress). I believe that taking a systematic approach to our marketing spend will pay off on a number of fronts : less waste, better leads, better decision making and increased sales.

1. I am now using the Google URL Builder to tag all of my Social Media posts, Email campaigns, and Adwords ads. These tags give me great insight what medium is most successful in driving activity to our web properties.
2. For years, we’ve had geographically-specific websites (for example, www.hostedpbxcalgary.com) which target local markets across Canada. We have local phone numbers in each of the regions that are only listed there, so that we know where an inbound sales call is being generated from. Also, we feel having a local phone number listed on our website will cause someone who might be sitting on the fence about calling to pick up the phone.
3. We’ve setup web-to-lead in Salesforce which allows me to capture website visitor information directly into Salesforce’s Lead form. This allows me to track a visitor from lead all the way through to customer (full life cycle), and gives me great insight into how many prospects actually buy, where the roadblocks might be in our sales process, and what we can do to grease the wheels so that more prospects convert into customers. Seeing this in action was a breakthrough moment for me, and I continue to refine this to provide better insights.
4. We also use Salesforce to do outbound email marketing (including automatic followups and drip campaigns), tracking HTML opens and quickly deleting those leads that have invalid information or bounced email addresses.
5. Lastly, I’m currently working with our graphic design team on landing pages. We’re using Unbounce so that we can do a lot of A/B testing on different in-page concepts and see what works and what doesn’t.

Why does it take a really good techie to be a really good marketer? Well, getting these integrations going between all the different components is not trivial. If I was a pure marketer counting on an IT staff to do this stuff, it would take forever and inevitably would be wrong. There is no recipe or step-by-step guide for this, you have to do it by trial and error. It really helps that I have admin access to all the tools and the authority to make changes as I see fit, in the best interests of the company.

I read a blog post on the weekend which goes into a little more detail about the challenges facing today’s marketer. It’s a well-written piece about something called a “Full Stack Marketer” and really was the impetus for my contribution today.

I can relate to those business owners and managers who don’t need another task on their to do list, but if you aren’t already doing this kind of analytical marketing you really need to start. Throwing money at the wall to see what sticks is a waste of valuable resources. I still lean heavily on my outsourced design team and consultants for specific deliverables, but it’s up to me to see the big picture and make sure all the marketing pieces are in alignment. Based on the linked blog post above, finding people or agencies who can do all this stuff is really tough. If your business is anything like ours, getting the marketing spend optimized can really lend itself to the bottom line.  Oh, and knowing how effective your different campaigns are really helps when your board starts asking questions about the large “Marketing” line item on your P&L .

Paul Emond - President, CEO

Paul Emond is a serial entrepreneur with a technology focus. A past company was recognized as one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada, and more recently Versature was honoured with the “Small Business of the Year” award from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

1. You are already drinking the Kool-Aid. Good for you!
2. You are aware of the shifting landscape, but are reluctant to change.
3. You have your head buried in the sand, and are about to get passed by your competition.

Ever since Microsoft’s “To The Cloud!” ad campaign there has been a lot of awareness about the Cloud within my circle of friends and business colleagues, which has been a great thing for companies like Versature.  There is a large ecosystem of businesses out there offering Cloud Computing technology and services that Versature is proud to participate in.  Of course, we utilize our own cloud services and those of our peers, because we know that to understand the Cloud revolution, we need to be a part of it.

I thought it might help other businesses to get an inside look at how we have structured our company around Cloud Computing technology.  The best thing about utilizing services from the Cloud is that you can choose “best of breed” solutions that perfectly fit with your business, or can be customized to do so.  In no particular order, these are the Cloud-based services that we use to run our business here at Versature.

• Email / Collaboration : Google Apps for Business
• CRM : Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Social Media :  Hootsuite
• Marketing Demand Generation : Unbounce, MailChimp
• Marketing Analysis : Google Analytics, Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Document Management : Box, Google Drive
• Subscription Based Billing : Zuora
• Business Intelligence : KlipFolio
• Software Development : Github, Google App Engine
• Website Performance Cache’ing : CloudFlare
• Technical Support : Salesforce Service Cloud, LogMeIn
• Online Backup : BackgroundBackup
• Phone System : Versature (of course)

Most of these tools work seamlessly with each other while providing us with a ton of business advantages above and beyond not having to host it ourselves or put out a large capital investment. As you can see, we are definitely embracing the Cloud revolution, and as an early adopter that has been through the ups and downs, it is very clear to us that this is the way to move ANY business forward.

At the core, we have embraced Salesforce.com.  Much more than a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, Salesforce.com runs our sales, provisioning, admin and support departments, and is the center of activity at Versature.  We’ve taken the time to “bake in” our business processes and have seen customer service improvements as less things are missed or neglected, especially as tasks move between departments.

If you have questions about how we use these tools or why we chose one over another option, feel free to ask in the comments below and we’ll do our best to answer.

Paul Emond - President, CEO

Paul Emond is a serial entrepreneur with a technology focus. A past company was recognized as one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada, and more recently Versature was honoured with the “Small Business of the Year” award from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

January 21, 2013 : Ottawa, ON – Versature today announced the immediate availability of the Polycom VVX 500 MultiMedia IP phone as an fully supported end-point option for Versature’s Hosted PBX service.  The VVX 500 was released last year, and Versature has had the phone in our lab and out with select customers on field trials over the past six months.

The VVX 500 is a really interesting telephone option for a number of reasons :

1. The price point is almost the same as our flagship phone, the SoundPoint IP550
2. The functionality of the phone matches and in some areas surpasses the IP550, specifically in the areas of call recording and integration with the PC.
3. The VVX 500 is field-upgradable to allow for video calling (USB), so it future-protects your investment.
4. The interface is a touch screen, almost iPhone-like, so working with the phone will be intuitive to most, right out of the box.

For more information on the Polycom VVX 500 Multimedia Phone, check out Polycom’s VVX 500 website or datasheet.  If you’d like to add the Polycom VVX 500 to your existing Versature installation, it is completely compatible with all the other Polycom offerings including the SoundPoint line of phones and conference phones.  Why not give Versature Sales a call to discuss your requirements?

It is our intention to collect applications from worthy organizations each quarter over the course of 2013 and to choose at least 1, but probably more, to support each quarter.  For full details and to apply, please see the dedicated page that we’ve setup for this program.

http://info.versature.com/community-improvement-program/

Unfortunately, it will not be possible for us to support every deserving organization who applies.  In response, for the first time in the history of our company, we’ve decided to provide discounted non-profit/charitable pricing plans as a standard part of our offering. As this program is just getting started we can’t share a link to our pricing, but we’ll update this posting as soon as it is ready (probably in early 2013).  In the meantime, if you are interested in finding out more about our non-profit/charitable discounted pricing, please contact our sales group at 1-877-498-3772, or email sales@versature.com.

Best of luck to all organizations who submit an application.  We look forward to working with you and in some small way be a part of the good work that you are doing in our community.  Again, check out the program details at :

http://info.versature.com/community-improvement-program/

10 years is kind of too old to be considered a startup, but maybe because of the pivots or maybe just because of the youthful culture at Versature, we honestly still consider ourselves a startup. Maybe it’s because we are David in the “David and Goliath” story going up against established players like Bell Canada, Telus, Rogers and Shaw. We need to be nimble, to innovate quickly, to try new things and not be afraid to make mistakes. I think that’s been one of the keys to our success so far.

So, what does the future hold for Versature? Dreaming big, we are looking into ways to provide our customers with data analytics tools so that they can slice-and-dice their phone traffic patterns and make informed business decisions around those metrics. Some people refer to this as “Big Data”, and it can be used to improve sales efficiency, increase support quality, and analyze call and voicemail patterns for relevant information to do with your business.

Another item on our roadmap is to identify those Cloud-based service providers with a complimentary offering that we might tie into, to improve our customer’s experience. Things like Cloud-based Email, File Storage, CRM, and other innovative services that we haven’t even considered yet. It’s fun to be part of the Canadian cloud ecosystem and encourage businesses to adopt cloud technologies.

Lastly, our partner Polycom has come out with a number of interesting video solutions in the past year. On the VoIP side, they have released the VVX500 and VVX600 which are camera-ready phones which are fully supported on our platform. Video has been something that has been promised to small business for years, and it seems that now the price point is finally down where it’s affordable. It still has to be proven that businesses need/want video as a communications tool, but with the price of the VVX phones at a similar price point to our regular VoIP phones, it will make sense to a lot of businesses to purchase the VVX options in order to future-proof themselves. We’ll have an announcement on pricing of the VVX line of phones in the new year.

So, Happy Birthday Versature! Looking forward to what the next 10 years brings us.

“Count your life by smiles, not tears. Count your age by friends, not years.”

Paul Emond - President, CEO

Paul Emond is a serial entrepreneur with a technology focus. A past company was recognized as one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Canada, and more recently Versature was honoured with the “Small Business of the Year” award from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.