SIP Trunk Basics: How To Start a Reselling Business 

Starting a reselling business is a comprehensive effort. It requires careful planning and consideration, from finding the right SIP trunk solution to sell to using the best promotional channels to bring in new customers.

Now is the perfect time to learn how to start a reselling business. Virtual phone lines for businesses are increasing in popularity and demand, and the SIP reselling industry is growing nearly 15% every year, with savvy resellers adding SIP trunking to their product lineup for clientele who are looking to modernize their telephony solution.

In this guide, we’ll cover the basic steps you’ll need to take to start your SIP trunk reselling business, from finding the right SIP platform to sell, to how to identify your audience and leverage the right promotional channels.

How to Start a Reselling Business for SIP Trunks in 6 Steps

With careful planning and execution, establishing yourself as a SIP reseller can be very profitable. Use the following steps as your guide for starting a reselling business, and attracting and retaining customers seeking to optimize their phone and phone line management.

1. Choose Your SIP Trunk Solution Partner

The first step in how to start a reselling business is finding a solution you feel confident to resell to your customers. They are trusting that you will guide them toward solutions that will enhance and support their existing operations, and maintaining their trust is key to sustaining a long-term business relationship. 

As you explore your options, ensure that the SIP trunk solution partner you’re considering offers the following features:

• Established industry expertise. Avoid brands who are new to the SIP trunk space, as their support service may lack the experience to help you if something goes wrong with your client’s service
• No big upfront payments, or long-term contracts that could prevent you from looking for alternatives if their solution doesn’t meet your or your clients’ expectations
• Comprehensive reseller support, creating a mutually beneficial partnership as you sell their services
• A white-label option that allows for custom branding, so your brand continuity flows seamlessly between your products
• Multi-platform compatibility, which can integrate with all major PBX and IP networks to expand your potential customer base
• A streamlined, easy onboarding process for you and your customers

After choosing your SIP trunk provider, you’re ready to develop a specific outreach strategy to your target customer demographics.

Related: Guide to being a SIP service provider 

2. Research Your Audience

Before beginning any type of promotional outreach to potential customers, you need to research your audience. Perform comprehensive market research to identify and understand the potential customers who are most in need of a virtual phone system.

This process will take time. You’ll want to dig into not only audience demographics but also variables like customer needs and pain points. You can even conduct user journey research to better understand how your audience discovers their need, finds potential solutions, and chooses the option that makes the most sense for them. 

Understanding their thought process and “customer journey” can help you identify ways to reach your audience at different phases of their journey, and how to speak directly to their pain points, to increase your chances of capturing their business, as you’ll appear to understand their needs and offer better solutions than your competitors.

Once you identify and understand your target audience, you can start creating a differentiation and marketing strategy that will attract them. Sufficient audience research can guide everything from the channels you choose for promotion, to the messaging that will capture and keep their attention. 

3. Research Your Competitors

Social media can be a useful tool for gathering intel about your competitors, helping you build more effective marketing strategies that will distinguish your solutions from other resellers.

If you’re new to social media, studying your competition’s social media strategy is an important step. You’ll want to ensure that you’re going above and beyond their efforts in attracting customers for your SIP trunk solutions.

First, determine who are your competitors. Use a search engine to look up keywords like “telecommunications providers + [your area]” or “SIP trunk solutions + [your area]” to research telecommunication and IT services specific to your region. After you find your competition in the VoIP reseller business, see which companies have active social media accounts.

When reviewing their social media accounts, notice what type of content they’re posting on Facebook. What are they tweeting on their Twitter accounts? Do they use other networks, like LinkedIn and Instagram?

You can take note of the hashtags they use, which you can also use in your posts to help you reach similar audiences, or see which types of posted content seem to resonate with their audience. Pictures? Videos? Helpful infographics? “Humanizing” posts that show the “behind the scenes” at their office?

Write down your observations in an easily-accessible file for later reference, and begin brainstorming ways you can harness your observations to make wholly-new content ideas that fit your brand and solutions.

4. Optimize Your Offering for Your Niche

The key to success in a reselling business is, in large part, about differentiation. Your competitors will be using similar solutions to attract the same types of customers. Use your market research to identify how you’ll differentiate yourself from your competition, based on your own core competencies and solving your customers’ needs.

For example, you might differentiate your business based on these strategies:

• The ability to offer a true partnership and easy setup that doesn’t require expertise in VoIP and SIP trunking on the customer side
• Flexibility for your customers to try out the new solution with you
• Competitive pricing that fits into your customers’ IT budget
• The ability to integrate the SIP trunk solution into your other service offerings
• Easy and fast customer service (more on that below)

Related: Keys to keeping SIP trunk customers happy

If you’re an established MSP, you’re likely already familiar with formal differentiation methods. If not, this guide on differentiation can help you get started.

5. Create a Promotional Strategy on Social Media

If you’re not on social media, research which social media platforms are most popular with the age demographic of your clients. Younger users enjoy platforms like TikTok, but older users might gravitate toward Facebook or Instagram, for example. In the B2B space, LinkedIn has become hugely important, but other networks should be considered, too.

If you already have a social media presence, access the platform’s free analytics tools to learn who’s following you, what times of the day they’re interacting with your pages, and review what kinds of posts seem to be resonating most with your audience.

After setting up a business account on the platform(s) you’ve chosen, research best practices for posting and sharing updates about your business. Hubspot, SproutSocial, and The Social Media Examiner all offer free, easy-to-read resources on growing your business’s social media presence.

To build and engage with your target audience, you need to create and post engaging content. If you’re posting content that isn’t related to business communications or technology in any way, then it might be seen by the social media platform as spam. Followers are less likely to engage with the page and are more likely to “unfollow” if they feel the content that is posted is spam.

To avoid this, post content that’s on-topic, useable, informative, and beneficial to your target audience. For example, posting videos is a great way to engage followers. You can post live videos, short-looping ones, or even longer ones. Our blog can give you tons of ideas about topics your audience might find of interest. 

Be sure to stay engaged with your followers. The goal is not just pushing out your product, but creating lasting business relationships. 

6. Build a Customer Service Strategy

Your current and future customers will have questions about their SIP trunk solution. Many customers will contact you on social media, and fast responses will be vital. When your target audience and potential customers are posting on your social media pages, it’s essential that you respond to these comments, questions, and messages in a timely manner. 

You need someone to be on top of your social media pages regularly, as many social media users expect companies on social media to respond to their inquiries and comments within only a few hours. Ignoring the ones who try to engage with your page is going to lead to a loss in customers.

When responding to your followers, be sure to keep customer service as a top priority. Assign certain customer service tasks to specific people in your company, to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. If you are a sole proprietor, set aside set times each day (we recommend at least twice a day) to check your social accounts. 

Engaging with your followers on a consistent basis shows you appreciate them, and can also become a core differentiator for your reselling business.

Partnering with the Best SIP Trunk Solutions Provider for Your Reselling Business

Understanding how to start a reselling business can seem complex, but following these steps will streamline the process. Social media can be a core part of researching your audience, attracting potential customers, and keeping customers happy through exceptional customer service.  

However, everything begins with finding the right white-label VoIP partner. The right solution is essential to differentiating your business, promoting it on social media, and keeping your customers satisfied. 

As a reliable solution founded by telecom experts with 50 years of combined experience, SIPTRUNK™ makes starting your reselling business easy, and our features and first-class VoIP solutions will ensure you’re always one step ahead of your competitors’ marketing promises. Contact us to get started with your SIP reselling today.