Things VAR's Will Love About Selling Telecom

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Things VAR's Will Love About Selling Telecom

As the carriers look to the VAR space as the new sales channel, I would like to tell the VAR community a few things that they will love about selling telecom.

1) Install dates that are fluid. Porting numbers happen at the whim of the carriers you are porting from. The FOC date (when carriers install circuits) will move without notice or at the most a day's notice.

2) Your current partners - HP, IBM, Microsoft or Cisco - have never snaked a deal from you, but in telecom it will happen often. Recently, one CLEC said no to quoting a Gig Network and carrier sales was in the customer the next day.

3) Commissions - every week the CFO examines the carrier's balance sheet and wonders why agent commissions payments still have to be made. In some cases, like InterNAP, they make the wrong decision and cut the agent program. You haven't seen that from your side.

4) Until recently, VAR partners weren't offering competing services. So you have Microsoft and the Office 365 monstrosity, imagine that every day from every carrier. A VAR offers Hosted email, so does the carrier. A VAR offers managed router and security, so does the carrier. Every day for every service, VAR's - and MSP's - will be competing head-to-head against a carrier, the so-called "partner".

5) VAR's are used to billing customers directly and now those bills will come directly from the carrier, interfering with the relationship.

This may sound sarcastic and even bitter, but with 13 years in the agent space, I have experienced this stuff as well as been told numerous stories by other agents. This is Telecom - and telecom is broken.

It has been 16 years since the Telecom Act that basically created CLEC's and the vast majority of them still do not have a smooth operation. Sad really, especially if you consider that at any time a giant like Google or even Microsoft could come in with a disruptive service and wipe it all out.


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