I have served in telecom since 1999, when I was dragged into selling for BellSouth as an agent, kicking and screaming. I had spent the prior three years in a Novell shop building and maintaining tape drives, LANs (remember Arcnet?), workstations, servers and modems. Then a quick stop in Cisco Networking Academy before plying Wholesale DSL, ATM, PRI and bandwidth to ISP's in the Southeast. Tom Steele's little agency of two became BellSouth Gold Partners. I kept adding carriers like Williams, where I met my good friend and all-around great guy Paul Aiello.

The next step was helping my clients with sales and marketing. The more they sold; the more I sold. I created a newsletter (the NSP Strategist) to inform my prospects and clients about industry news and happenings and how that would effect them. Tips on sales, marketing and what I call strategy were also included and resulted in over 500 pages of work that became my book, SELLECOM: 101 Ideas for Marketing in the Telecom Jungle.

Today, I am still an agent for about 20 carriers (all through other master agents), but I spend more time consulting for service providers (ISP, WISP, CLEC, MSO, FTTH, and ITSP) on strategy, marketing, messaging, and sales training. I also spend a good deal of time blogging here at TMC and other places. Thanks for reading!