I had another conversation today about the declining revenues of the hyper-competitive sector of IT and telecom. Why is it a commodity? Mainly, a lack of differentiation.

The idea of branding is that your value statement gets out to the marketplace. If you tell the story about what your value is, what your company values are, you are building a brand.

The problem that a lot of telecom and IT companies have is that they don't have a brand. No brand = No Value.

Want an example? Look at Salesforce in the CRM space. Salesforce is almost synonymous with CRM, but very few people can tell me why they would suggest (or purchase) Salesforce over Sugar, Zoho, Microsoft, ACT or any of the others. The CRM space is a lot like the VoIP space: too many players, not enough differentiation - or put another way: a me-too commodity market.

The story of the value and benefits of your company and services is the deviation you need to build a brand for your company and its services to the marketplace.

It's funny, because many marketing heads say they understand this stuff, yet do not put it into play. (BTW, just having a product name isn't branding. And for pete's sake, please stop using names for companies and products that are so close tonames already in use!)

How is your SIP Trunk or Hosted PBX better than your competitor's?