Seven Hundred Thousand, Thirteen Million, Twenty-One Million, Two Hundred and Fifteen Million

Abracadabra...How a phone works is like magic and the general user does not care about the technology. Telephone penetration is the United States is between 95 and 96% and cell phone penetration is at 88.8%. Guess what...90% have no idea how the technology works. People simply pick up the devices and expect them to work. They use less than half of the available features on a device they employ nearly every day. Finally, more than 80% of US homes have a personal computer. So why do we attempt to sell this new service which simply uses computers to make a phone call in such a complicated way?

Selling this phone service should be easy. It should not be full of jargon. The IP community decided to call using a computer to make phone calls, Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP. The improvement in how those calls would be handled got the name Session Initiation Protocol or SIP. We have made the discussion of buying this type of service sound more and more complicated. Even keeping your phone number as you move from carrier to carrier has a long confusing name, Local Number Portability or LNP. None of these terms or acronyms is needed to convince a business owner to switch to a service, not technology, that is cheaper.

VARs constantly ask me questions related to the technology of SIP Trunking and after a while I make a simply reply, "At the end of the day, it's a phone line." It is not about a SIP Trunk, concurrent call sessions, G.729 codec or, the ever unknowable, NAT traversal. What a business wants to know is that the phones will work, people will hear, sales can be made and orders can be received.

As we train our sales and sale support organizations to understand VoIP/SIP Trunking with its related equipment and services, we also need to teach them how to communicate in lay terms. It really is this simple.

"Switch to a phone company that can save you 50% and keep all of your current phone numbers."

Sure, there are business technologists at every level of SOHO, SMB and Enterprise. However, the vast majority just want to buy the new cheaper and better phone service. Teach your teams to begin there and you'll close deals a lot faster.

Google Search Results:

Seven Hundred Thousand (SIP Trunking)

Thirteen Million (VoIP)

 Twenty-One Million (Business VoIP)

Two Hundred and Fifteen Million (Business Phone Service)

Enjoy the weekend! See you on Monday with a new recipe.