A couple of marketing lessons from the campaign. (Non-political).

If your Brand is broken, run a Branding campaign not a negative campaign.

When your brand is broken -- maybe your uptime is three eights instead of nines or maybe your customer service is notoriously awful - the buyer doesn't have trust in you. You need Trust for being to buy.

Look at how Ma and Pa Bell (Verizon and AT&T)have been re-branding away from telecom. Meanwhile, CenturyLink, Windstream and Frontier have been struggling to find their brand, their message, their future.

EarthLink had struggles growing beyond a dial-up ISP. They tried so much stuff: DSL, cable resell, MVNO, Muni wi-fi, VoIP, fiber, etc. - before finding their groove in Retail.

FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) will get you so far, but the best brands in the DNC ran on hope, change and issues. Take a lesson from people doing it better than you. Learn from your rivals what resonates with your buyers.

I look at the independent candidates who took 9% of the total vote. They remind me of the 1195 other Hosted VoIP/UCaaS providers in the US. You say you are in the running, but are you even campaigning? Are you doing ANY effective marketing, advertising, PR? Chances are: notsomuch.

To look at Broadsoft as a candidate that thought it should have won - and quite frankly has disappointed. Of the top UCaaS providers - RC, 8x8, thinkingphones/Fuze, Star2Star, West, Broadview, Mitel, Jive, CoreDial, Cisco and Microsoft - none of them are using Broadsoft. That has to be disheartening. To some extent that is like the Democratic candidates for House and Senate that lost. The party leader didn't help them win; the big name, carrier grade softswitch didn't help the 400+ UCaaS players win either. (You could argue that a few are doing well, like Vonage Business, Nextiva, Evolve IP and Comcast. Yet mainly the Top 25 are anything but BSFT. Isn't that interesting?)

Doesn't matter the technology or the pedigree, you have to market to win.