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

agents

Why Accurate Paperwork is Necessary

May 12, 2011

I have hired salespeople that just don't want to do paperwork. Someone else should handle that why they do the "important work" of sales. I would buy into that if that superstar was closing a lot of deals or had a full funnel with a fantastic close ratio, but that is hardly ever the case.

Many salespeople don't like using CRM either, but that's a different blog post.

Schools and Libraries are Off Limits

May 12, 2011

Saw this notice today: "AT&T corporate policy prohibits Alliance Channel Solution Providers from selling AT&T services to E-Rate eligible customers (which includes all K-12 schools and public libraries). Do not engage in sales activity of any kind with E-Rate eligible customers."

That's interesting because almost all schools and libraries are E-Rate eligible (if they do the paperwork). So if Agents want to sell to schools and libraries, Agents will need to bring in a different carrier.

Losses and Growth

May 10, 2011

The only thing really growing is debt.

Clearwire grew revenue but also its losses.

PAETEC finished swallowing CavTel to get to ~$2B in revenue but with losses. And with just 54,000 business customers. (Cbeyond has more than 58,000). Margins are 18.4% according to Rob Powell.

Centurylink is getting hit with a lot of access line loss which is adversely affecting its revenue.





So Clearwire is Still Doing Retail

May 6, 2011

The Inexpensive Cloud

April 21, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Amazon Web Services including EC2 is down today. When Gmail has any failure my twitter stream goes nuts. Facebook collapses often.

There is one thing people should keep in mind: Building Resiliency and Survivability into a Cloud Platform is not cheap.

For Agents, used to selling TDM with five nines reliability, moving to VoIP with less than that will be a shock, especially when they find out after the first outage.

For VAR's, who have been running their own servers, and like visitors to  Vegas who tell me they are up money, will tell you about never having any down time, moving customers to the Cloud, where you lack control and transparency, will be unsettling.





There's a New Sheriff in Town

April 11, 2011

VZ One Year

April 11, 2011

A Failure to Communicate

April 6, 2011

In the Agent space, many non-telco vendors (like Conferencing and Hosted PBX providers) have tried to get traction. Sales traction from this independent sales force. It isn't going well.

Agents (and VAR's) spend about 80-99% of the work week in the comfort zone. That is, doing what they have always done.

VARs are Replacing Agents

April 3, 2011

In an article in Channel Partners magazine, Master Agents discuss how all their future growth will come from VAR's. Carriers are chasing VAR's for any growth in Channel numbers. Where does that leave the Agents?

Well, Agents can partner with VAR's to be the telecom provisioning department. Or Agents can start getting uncomfortable or irrelevant.

Exam the fact that most Agents do not want to sell cellular.



What is a Master Agent?

March 30, 2011

A buddy of mine and I have been having a conversation for about a month about Master Agencies. We are trying to decide if there is a standard definition for the term.

Generally, a master agent has direct contracts with carriers. These typically come with hefty quotas; hence, why they need sub-agents.

Master Agencies generally perform back office support for the sub-agents.



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