What makes a finalist?

Here at AudPro, we’ve enjoyed developing our awards submission, relishing in the joy of being shortlisted, and attended some wonderful events where we’ve finally been able to get back to some face-to-face festivities!

Simply developing and writing awards submissions offers the opportunity to take stock of the year we’ve had – the wins, losses and dramas – and celebrate the immense efforts of our team and the results we’ve achieved together.

And after years of consistently attaining finalist spots at the Comms National Awards, including this year’s ‘Best Channel Business Service’ category, we thought it would be worth offering our two cents on what makes a great finalist in the channel.

Partner support is key

Considering we operate in such an interconnected market, maximising the support that vendors offer to their partners is a vital aspect of those relationships. That’s why we’ve heavily invested in our sales journey, Partner Toolkits and marketing support, to ensure that our partners can increase their margins without sacrificing time and resources.

For example, our new “auto-quote” prompt populates prices on order submission, reducing the lead time and increasing visibility for both end-users and partners. Partners also automatically receive quotes to eliminate the chances of missed opportunities and over-spend.

The team has deployed ‘Direct CRM Integration’ for a quicker order-handling experience, ensuring the entire order-process can be included and reported within our own CRM, allowing it to increase its order-handling capability, without compromising service. It also enables us to report on historic orders, providing partners with more re-sale opportunities.

We’ve also worked closely with our marketing team to enhance the New Customer Toolkit to ensure new partners can quickly run marketing campaigns that get the tried and tested messaging, that we’ve honed over the last 20 years, out in front of their customers.

And for those partners that don’t have the resources or knowledge internally, we’ve created the ‘Premier Partner Programme’, which offers full marketing management and fully branded collateral, with a hands-off experience for partners, so that they can focus on what matters most.

“From the second week of working with them, AudPro had emails ready to send to our existing customers and target accounts, looking as good as any outreach we would send ourselves.

Inbound marketing is new to us and even with the longer sales journey, we’ve seen open rates above 15% and attracted double-digit sales within the first month. This was an amazing result from a new Value-Add partner!”

– David Munro, Head of Product, HighNet Telecoms

Developing our product offering

The last two years have been a challenge for pretty much every business, which is why we’ve revised and restructured every area of the business, from our core Music on Hold product to how we support our partners’ marketing, further enhancing our proposition, including:

• Adding new more diverse range of voices
• Adding an auto-quote function to the portal
• Deploying direct CRM integration
• Simplifying pricing and sales journey
• Adding cloud-based and text to speech functions

We had to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic too, reducing our minimum spend for partners by 50%, helping them offer a more cost-effective solution to their customers. And these changes certainly helped our partners win more business, considering they’ve enjoyed 30% YoY growth on average!

“AudPro very quickly tweaked their commercial model through Covid to allow our proposition to be even more flexible. This allowed us to continue to deploy the solution even through difficult times, and still win more business.”
– Director, Start Communications

Tough competition isn’t a bad thing

Just like in sport – think Federer/Nadal, Venus/Serena, Messi/Ronaldo or Coe/Ovett– having a competitor that drives you to do better is a good thing.

In the channel, your rivals push you to drive costs down, enhance customer support and more to better compete, meaning another positive aspect of entering industry awards (especially if you win) is being able to see how you ‘stack-up’ against those competitors.

From our point of view, even getting to the finals in both the Comms National Awards and Comms Business Awards is still a massive achievement, and we couldn’t be prouder of our team! Given that some of our closest partners were also finalists (sitting at the same table, enjoying the evening together and winning accolades themselves), we couldn’t be happier to have shared in their celebrations and enjoyed the night with our partners.

Looking to the future

Now that the suits are back at the dry cleaners, we’ve recovered from our hangovers and back at our desks, we have a new opportunity. Having seen the competition and celebrated our successes, it’s time to do better.

There are big developments in the works, here in Hazel Grove, and we can’t wait to share them with you over the coming months.

We have a strong team behind us, supported by our amazing voiceover artists and reseller partners, and we know that we can go from strength-to-strength next year, making an even bigger impact in the channel, so that we stand every chance of taking home a trophy next year!