The UCaaS Buying Mess Explainer with edits
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Brian Nichols (New): [00:00:00] Have you ever tried to buy a phone system for your business? Not like pick one up at Best Buy. I mean, actually go through the process of evaluating, comparing, and then purchasing a unified communications platform for your company. Because if you have, I already know the look on your face right now. It's the same look someone gets when they realize they've been on hold for 45 minutes.

With the company that literally sells the communication tools, the, I mean the irony and look, that's what we're digging into today because there's something fundamentally broken happening in the world of business communications. And it's not the technology. 'cause the technology, I mean, it's great actually, , I mean, we've got AI powered call routing, real time transcription, sentiment analysis, video conferencing that actually works. The tech is not the problem. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to actually buy any of it.

And the vendors. The ones selling [00:01:00] these solutions, they're the ones complaining the loudest about how hard it is to close deals. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. So here we are, it's 2026, you're a business owner. Maybe you've got 50 employees, maybe 200. It doesn't matter. And you know your phone system is garbage.

Your team has been complaining, customers are getting dropped and the whole thing feels like it was built in 2006 because it probably was. So you do what any reasonable business owner would do. You go to Google Best Business phone System 2026. And what do you find? Every single vendor saying the same exact thing.

AI powered Cloud Native . Five nines uptime, seamless integrations. Cool, but how much does it actually cost? Contact us for pricing. Hmm. Okay, so you click on another one, request a demo to learn more. [00:02:00] And another talk to our sales team for a custom quote. And you as a business owner, you just wanted a ballpark number.

You wanted to know if you were looking at 20 bucks a user or 200 bucks a user, and instead now you've signed up for three separate discovery calls with three separate sales teams who are gonna spend the first 20 minutes asking you about your digital transformation journey.

Ugh. Sound familiar? If you're a vendor or, or you're in the channel, it might be hitting a little too close to home. See, according to Trust Radius, 49% of B2B software buyers said the same thing. The number one thing that they would change about a buying process is the lack of transparent pricing. Half of all buyers saying the exact same thing.

And that is just tell me what it costs and the industry collectively responds with Schedule a call. You see where the problem is here [00:03:00] folks.

So let's zoom out for a second because this isn't just a ucas problem. This is a channel problem. And by the way, it's a B2B technology buying problem as well.

And what I've been seeing is that it's not getting better, it's getting worse. And let's walk through why the actual buying journey has gotten so frustrating right now, especially if you're a small or medium sized business, just trying to buy, let's say a phone system.

Step one, you Google it, right? You, you get hit with a wall of identical marketing language. Everyone's got ai, everyone's got five nines, uptime. Everyone integrates with everyone, but nobody tells you what it costs. Step two, maybe you hear about technology advisors that the folks, they are supposedly working in this weird thing called the channel and they help you navigate the, the vendor mess and they work through this thing called A-T-S-D-A-A technology.

Service distributor.

Think of it more like they're the middlemen, right? Between you and the actual vendors. So the vendors make the phone system, [00:04:00] the TSD distributes it across the vendor channel, and then the technology advisor in that vendor channel, uh, sell it to you, right? And somewhere in the middle of all that, the pricing gets buried under six layers of custom quotes, uh, ridiculous contract terms.

And of course, the, let me go back and check with my finance team. Now, look, I work in the channel. This is my life. I live this every single day. And there are genuinely great people doing great work in this space. Technology advisors who are truly con consultative, right? Like TSDs are out there investing in real tools and resources to help enable those folks.

But let's be honest about what the experience looks like from the buyer's perspective. And if we're gonna be real. It's a nightmare and it's getting messier because the dirty little secret in the UCAS market in 2026 is that every vendor is pitching the same exact thing.

It's all ai, right? Automation and it all blurs together, especially for buyers who [00:05:00] buy the stuff like what, once every seven years if that. See one channel expert, um, recently nailed it. He said, if you can't tell a clear, compelling story. You're toast. The MSP down the street with the Sharper Message is gonna win that deal even if their tech is identical to what you have.

And that's on the vendor side. But now imagine being the buyer on the receiving end of five identical pitches from five vendors who all claim to be different. You can't tell them apart and they won't show you pricing. And each one wants a 45 minute demo before they'll even give you a ballpark.

Overwhelmed yet. Oh, and by the way, on top of that, and this is the part that should get you really excited, there's consolidation. Happening everywhere. So small channel partners, they're getting squeezed, vendors are overhauling their partner programs and the message to smaller players is basically, hey, get bigger, uh, add services or get outta the way.

So [00:06:00] the very ecosystem that's supposed to help buyers navigate this mess is itself going through a crisis. Okay, so now meanwhile, back to you the buyer. Just sitting there going, I need a phone system. Uh, and see, you got hundreds of vendors. Most of them, again, sound identical. Pricing models that range from $13 a user up to $50 a user.

And before you add in the hardware, the implementation, the training, the support, the porting, the network assessment. I mean, one industry, put it bluntly, the advertise per user price. It almost never tells the full story.

You see $20 a month and you think I, I got my budget figured out, right? But then you realize, oh shoot, I need that desk phone. Um, actually I need several desk phones. Ooh. And I need conference room phones and I need a headset or two.

Oh, and that white glove onboarding we were promised. Yeah, that was a paid add-on. Ugh. See again, [00:07:00] here's the thing. In 2026, Gartner says 61% of B2B buyers already prefer a purchasing experience without sales reps involved. Let that sink in. Folks, the majority of business owners don't want to talk to you as a salesperson, and yet the entire UCaaS buying process.

Is built around forcing them into actually talking to someone like that.

See if you wanna know who's been complaining the loudest about everything I've been talking about here today. It's actually not the buyers, it's the vendors. Because what I've been hearing from them is that we, we can't close deals.

The sales cycle, it's too long. Prospects are going dark, we're losing to the competition. And I, and I'm just sitting here like, Hey guys, have, have you tried? Making it possible for someone to actually buy your product, because the reality that no one wants to say out loud the vendors, y'all are making this harder than it needs to be on purpose.[00:08:00] 

Now, look, you're not doing it maliciously well, I, I, I hope not, but nobody sat in a boardroom saying, how do we make things more confusing? But functionally, that's what happened. See they hid pricing because they want to control the sales process. They dated everything behind a sales call because they want to qualify leads, and they made quoting processes take days because they want to customize the experience.

And in doing all of that, they create a buying experience so painful. They have other prospects, again, quietly gave up and stuck with their crappy legacy systems.

And guess what? These same vendors are now pouring money into AI tools, into marketing automation, retargeting campaigns. SDR teams all designed to reengage the very leads they drove away in the first place. Yeah, you spent a fortune building a moat around your pricing, and now you are spending another fortune trying to lure people across it.

[00:09:00] See, here's a number that should haunt every UCA vendor. The average B2B conversion rate, 1.8%, not even 2% guys, and a major reason for that. People bail when they can't get a straight answer on what something costs. People aren't saying no to your product. Your product's probably great. What they're saying no to is your process.

That's a big difference.

So what is this really? Well, it's not a sales problem, it's a customer experience problem, and this is why I get all fired up about this because we talk about CX all day long in the industry, and we sell CX tools, we sell contact center platforms with AI powered chat bots and omnichannel routing and real time sentiment analysis.

And then we make it an absolute hell for someone to actually buy our solutions. It's like a gym that makes you climb a rope just to walk through the front door. [00:10:00] The thing you're selling is supposed to make life easier, and your buying process is the hardest part of the whole experience. I mean, think about your own customer experience as a consumer for a second

when you wanna buy something in 2026, whether it's a pair of shoes, a hotel room, a a car insurance policy. I mean, if you're online, what do you expect? You expect to see the price. You expect to compare options, and you expect to make a decision on your timeline, not on some sales reps quota, a calendar. And if a company can't give you that, you bounce instantly.

You don't fill out a form and then wait 48 hours for a personalized quote. You go to the competitor who made it easy, and guess what? 74% of B2B buyers now expect clear pricing directly on a vendor's website. See, that's not some fringe demand. That's three out of four people telling you in plain [00:11:00] English, show me the numbers, or I'm gone.

And get this, the companies that do embrace pricing transparency, while they're seeing shorter sales cycles, higher quality leads and better close rates, not because they have a better product, but because they have a better buying experience. It's so simple, it hurts.

So why do we think that business buyers are any different than consumers? Newsflash, they're not. They're the same people. They buy stuff on Amazon at night. They compare hotel prices on Expedia. They browse Zillow with a glass of wine on Tuesday night just for fun, and then they show up to work Wednesday morning and they get told, oh, you wanna know how much a phone system costs? Let me schedule a discovery call for you next Thursday. Ugh. I mean, the B2B world is a full decade behind the consumer world when it comes to the buying experience. And the crazy part is the tools to fix this already [00:12:00] exist.

The data is there, the platforms are there. The ability to show transparent pricing offers side by side comparisons, let people self-serve their way through a buying journey. It's all there, but most of this industry is still operating like it's 2006, still hiding behind gated content and forced demos and pricing that requires an NDA.

So what happens when you make it this hard to buy? Well, you lose deals you never knew existed. And that right there should be the scariest part because it's not the deals that went dark after the third follow-up. It's the deals that never started. The prospect you landed on your website, couldn't find a price, and they left.

Brian Nichols (New): The business owner who asked a friend for a recommendation instead of wading through your sales funnel, the IT director who just renewed the contract with the old vendor because switching to a new vendor sounded like too much of a headache. See, these are invisible losses [00:13:00] and they don't show up in your CRM.

They don't trigger a lost deal report. They just don't happen, and you'll never know.

And I talk to vendors all the time who say, well, our product is better. We just can't get in front of enough people, really? Or is it that you are getting in front of them and then you're losing them because your website reads like a brochure from 2014? 'cause here's the reality,

today's buyer, especially the millennial and Gen Zers, who are gonna be running purchasing departments for these companies, they have zero tolerance for outdated websites and manual processes. Zero. They grew up comparing products on their phone. They trust peer review over your marketing,

and they expect to complete most of their research independently before they even talk to a human.

One industry analyst said that by 2036, 80% of B2B sales interactions are expected to move to digital channels over 80%. So if your entire sales motion is built [00:14:00] around getting someone on a phone call before they can learn anything meaningful about your product, you're building a wall between yourself and 80% of your potential customers.

And then we wonder, well, why is our revenue falling flat? Okay. Multiply this across the entire industry. Hundreds of vendors, thousands of technology advisors, tens of thousands of potential buyers, and a buying experience that feels like it was designed by people who never really actually had to buy the product they're selling.

All right, so Brian, what do we actually do about it? Well, good news 'cause we don't complain here in CX about the bs. We actually offer some prescriptions and honestly, today's prescriptions not complicated. Number one, show your pricing. I don't care if it's a range, I don't care if it's starting at, just give people something.

Let them self-qualify. Let them know if they're in the right ballpark before they burn 30 [00:15:00] minutes of their life. On our demo companies that do this, they convert two to three times better than those who hide behind pricing forms. And you know why? Because the people that wanna engage after seeing the price actually want your product, not just your free trial.

Number two, make comparing easy. Right now, if you're a business and you wanna compare three ucast providers, they need to sit through three separate sales pitches, request three separate quotes, and then normalize the data themselves. That's insane. Think about how you buy a car right now, or a flight or a home.

You go to one place, you see your options, you compare and you decide that model exists for basically every major consumer purchase in America, but for B2B technology, nope. Here's three sales reps. Good luck.

And number three, respect the buyer's timeline. Stop creating these stupid false senses of urgency. Stop with a, this price [00:16:00] is only good until the end of the quarter garbage. And stop with a follow up cadences that feel like stalker Xs. Guys, if your product is good, let it speak and then give the people the information they need and when they need it, they need it.

And trust that a well-informed buyer will make a decision faster than one you're trying to force through a pipeline. Now, imagine a world where a business owner can go to one place, browse available solutions, see real pricing, compare features side by side, and either buy directly or talk to a real human advisor who actually understands their business, not a bot, not a gated PDF, not a three week sales cycle just to learn what something costs.

A real modern buyer first experience see. That's what 2026 should look like. That's what consumers already have everywhere else, and that's what B2B buyers deserve. And number four, and this is a big one, ask yourself honestly, is it hard for people to buy from [00:17:00] you? Not just in the UCAS world, in whatever industry you're in, can someone figure out what you sell another 30 seconds on your website? And then can they understand your pricing without having to call someone?

Can they get from, I'm interested to, I'm a customer without jumping through a million hoops that they feel were designed in a different century. If the answer is no to any of those, well, you don't have a sales problem. You have a CX problem, and the fix isn't another AI chat bot.

It's not another marketing funnel. It's not another retargeting campaign. The fix is making it easier for people to give you their money. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Look, I love this industry. I work on it every single day, and there are brilliant people doing incredible work building communications platforms that genuinely change how people and their businesses [00:18:00] operate. But we've gotta stop making it so hard for people to buy because the businesses that figure this out first, the ones that say, Hey, what if we just made it easy?

Those are the ones that are gonna win, not because they had the best ai. Not because they had the most features, not because they had the fanciest slide deck, but because they respected the buyer enough to get out of their own way. And that is good cx. And it's not rocket science. It's not some $50,000 consulting engagement.

That's just common sense. Meet people where they're at, give them what they need, and then stop making them jump through hoops just to give you money.

So lemme leave you with this. Whether you're a vendor, a technology advisor, a a business owner, or just someone who's tried to buy literally anything in the B2B space and wanted to pull your hair out, controls you can control, make it easy, make it clear, make it human, and stop [00:19:00] hiding prices like it's a state secret.

Stop treating the buying process like an obstacle course and start treating it like what? It should be a conversation between two people who are trying to solve a problem. It's 20, 26 folks. Let's start acting like it now. Get out there. Be great. And as always, I'm rooting for. With that being said, hit subscribe , and I'll see you in the next episode of CX without the bs.

Talk to you then.