On Rad's Radar? - communications Archives

10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

2013-05-23T15:46:23Z

Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here.

In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is the serve. See that post here. Best female server in the world now is Logan Tom. The key is practice and visualization. What you see in your mind's eye and what you tell yourself affect the outcome. Thinking Don't Miss, Don't Miss - is no way to serve an ace. See the play. Talk Positive to yourself. Think about what you want to happen. Then Breathe and Execute.

The volleyball can travel at 60 mph. That doesn't leave you long for reaction time. You need to focus on each contact of the ball. Can you watch the ball right into your hands? Karch, Logan, Misty are studies in concentration and focus. Focus. Lots of noise and distractions. Concentrate.

Penelope Trunk used to play pro beach volleyball. She writes about her lack of focus in high stress situations here.

After the serve, it is all scrambling around. The best laid plans and all that. Most of my clients spend their day putting out fires. Just reacting. You work on the urgent, instead of the important. It comes down to your goal - how bad do you want it? Sometimes you have to scramble to find the time to work on the important.

In sports they always talk about heart. Why not in business? You must have desire to run a business. It is no easy task to build a business. You have to want it in a big way. Without desire, each obstacle will seem like a dead end. Heart means you Never Give Up!

Blocking is my favorite play. There is nothing better than taking someone's best hit and sending it right back at them. I'm sure there is a lesson there - or some psychological malady - but I will leave it to you to figure it out. I would not have gotten better at blocking without coaching, I can tell you that. Yes even I can take constructive criticism once in a while.

Because there are only 2 of you covering 900 square feet, Communications is integral. Short, simple, clear, concise communications, like a tweet or a text. If only more people could communicate that way, especially managers, life would be great for the employees. You have to find a way be clear in messages because text and email are one dimensional platforms.

Being able to share your vision for the company or the new product launch requires clear communication - both internally and externally. In a telecom world in turmoil as we shift from network to cloud/apps/services, communication will be the factor that determines success over failure.

Everyone wants to be the hitter - the one who spikes the ball and makes ESPN. That one play takes timing, practice, focus, and much more for the play to go well. It's like sales in a way. You only get ink on the contract when it all comes together. When you have worked on your pitch, discovery, sales process, objections, proposal, listening, timing, and more. Spiking is as thrilling as getting ink (and happens about as often ;)

The one thing a hitter needs to remember is to keep the ball in front of them. It's the best way to make good contact with the ball. Keep it in front of you. It also allows you to take a peak at the defense to see where to hit. If you keep the ball in front of you, you can find the seam and make blockers look silly. Finding the seam in a block is a lot like finding your niche in the marketplace. You can't hit or be every where, but that one opening will allow you to score.

In beach volleyball, there are only 2 players. This partnership is crucial for success. It's like finding a co-founder for your business Sometimes it isn't even about friendship, but who can you work with, who complements your skills to provide you with success. In the pros, partners switch often as they seek that elusive perfect partner who will complement them and has the right chemistry to produce wins.

Yet when you find that partner, the sky's the limit. If you are on the same page with the same goal, have a proper contract, a clear understanding of roles, a willingness to work hard, to give it your all - your focus, effort, energy, and commitment, you are on your way to success.

The big lesson you learn playing volleyball is defeat. You can't win them all. And you can't blame your teammates. You know if you played well, if you served the ball in each time, if you made mistakes. Own up, learn from it, and put your flop down to play again.

"Train Hard. Play Fearlessly" sounds like pop culture right? But actually that is putting it as simply as possible. I played 4s Sunday. It was playing for fun, but I still gave every play 100% effort. I like to compete. I like to win. I like to play well even in defeat.

The one thing about this sport is that I love it. I love watching it and playing it, even through many injuries. Life is short. Do what you love.

Remember that Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

The Cloud Communications Alliance in Clearwater

2013-02-05T18:02:23Z

The Cloud Communications Alliance is meeting in Clearwater, FL.

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Larry Lisser from EMBRASE presenting at the CCA meeting in Clearwater FL.

Joe Marion, President of the CCA, welcoming everyone this morning.

Is it Cloud versus Agents?

2012-05-02T16:45:52Z

Is it Cloud versus Agents?

As an Agent, I sell bandwidth and transport almost exclusively. I am learning that the Channel does not want that business. The carriers do, but on the wholesale/carrier side. No 10GB private lines. No 1GB ports. Nope. The Channel wants Multi-site multi-access customers. That's fine. Just stop talking about your fiber map then. It's irrelevant for that kind of sale.

The CLEC's also want Agents to sell Managed Services and anything Cloud. That's nice but who cares?

Cbeyond announced that they are "no longer recruiting traditional telecom agents". well, they already signed up the biggest masters - CMS, Telarus, Microcorp, TBI, etc. So what they are really saying is that traditional agents will have to use a master agent to get paid. That's becoming Normal in telecom. Carriers just want to deal with master Agents. I guess, they think that is more effective or efficient. I have no idea if it is either. We'll see, I guess.

Like so many other providers, Cbeyond thinks that the answer to its cloud strategy will be VAR's. That's not likely to happen.

VAR's don't trust telco. (Heck, I'm still waiting a month for an FOC from XO on an Internet T1, so I totally get the attitude.) VARs already have relationships with VAD's like Ingram and Tech Data, who can provide most of what Cbeyond is offering - or they can provide it themselves. Would you go to Rackspace or Cbeyond or EarthLink for hosting? That's basically what it comes down to: who is doing the hosting.

Right now Microsoft itself and carriers are getting into the traditional VAR space (offering hosted Microsoft products and data backup). Why would VAR's shift from a reseller model to a sales agent? It's kind of like, do you want white-label or straight resale?

The thing that most miss is that it is all about Control. In white-label, you can build a branded business that you have a decent amount of control over, especially in Hosted PBX. In straight resale, the bill, the brand, everything is in the carrier's name. No control at all.

My clients - CLEC, ISP and ITSP - want the illusion of control - or at least as much control as they can get. VAR's want the same thing. In the case of the ISP and the VAR, they like technology, but selling and marketing not-so-much. And you won't have much success forcing them into a sales+marketing shop - any more than you will trying to get T1 slingers become Consultative Sales people pitching cloud. Why? Motivation. Comfort Zone.

Robin Robbins has a very successful business offering turn-key marketing programs to VAR's. Cloud providers need to plug in to that kind of a system.

XO just re-launched its old hosting brand, Concentric, probably to get some space between the telco and its cloud services. (XO has to do something about its reputation in the telecom space and re-branding buys them time until someone buys them.)

Some Agents will obviously move into this space. Some already have making money on Cloud Comm like Hosted PBX, UC, IVR and conferencing. Some have sold collocation - although its a big leap to PAAS and IAAS from colo. But virtualization might be a nice tool in that box. It will come down to who you trust to deliver it.

I'm not saying Agents shouldn't be shifting their business. Lord knows that the way it is now, it is extremely tough to make the living we are used to while selling what we are used to. So a shift has to come. I just don't think it will be to the same carriers that make it in the future. When you look at things like commission adjustments, contract disputes, channel segmentation, and the like, Agents might want to try another silo of vendors to see if they get a better shake.

There is a tremendous amount of competition for the attention of Agents and VARs. That means that there will be price competition, commission shopping, and other things that the providers do not want to have to deal with right now.

The only providers who can afford to be exclusive right now are vertical cloud providers and cablecos - both have an almost exclusive product to offer.

Everyone else is selling the same stuff - MPLS, SIP, backup, managed network security, blah, blah, blah. That means the Channel can shop around. And as you can see from the ecosystem diagram, there are a lot of places to shop - VAD, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, ILEC, CLEC, Cableco, MSP, Rackspace, Web hosts, Parallels, ITSP's, and so much more. And Agents can just partner up with a VAR or MSP to sell their own services, leaving the CLEC's out to dry.

It's a matter of control. Do you want to build yourself a business with white-label partners (like VAR Dynamics) or do you want to trust that the telco that is having trouble delivering telecom services reliably will be able to provide you and your customers with unparallelled service delivery of cloud services?

We'll see. In the mean time, be nicer to the Agents. They may be all you have left.

Why Did ShoreTel Buy M5?

2012-02-10T15:48:57Z

Recently, M5 Communications was acquired for about $160 million by ShoreTel. The premise PBX vendor had a bad quarter and caved to the pressure of Hosted PBX. Avaya, Interactive Intelligence and MITEL have hosted offerings. At some point, ShoreTel had to jump on that bandwagon - due to the big opportunity (ask any analyst) and the threat that cloud comm places on premise only sellers.

I think some of that money - now $162 M based on the stock - was for Dan and his team to stay on and continue to run the machine. There are a couple of million in accelerators in the LOI (letter of intent), also. Plus what does Shoretel know about running a service or the proprietary softswitch that M5 switched to in 2010? The M5 team had to stay (for a while).

ShoreTel's C-level exes probably saw that the hole in their strategy by not having a CaaS strategy. After that, the decision comes down to build-or-buy. The advantage to buying is that - if done properly - you get revenue, a market proven service offering, and a sales channel. Building from scratch has a big learning curve, capital investment and little revenue.

By scooping up M5, ShoreTel gets a proven business model. At $48 million in revenue, M5 was one of the giants in the Hosted PBX space with a proven sales record that had grown 30% in the last year. Their indirect and direct sales teams were effectively selling the service. Not many VoIP providers are organically growing revenue. In 2010, M5 was doing about $32M in revenue when it acquired Gekkotech, a Chicago based VoIP provider that was utilizing M5's softswitch platform and bringing in about $8M.

M5 left the Broadsoft platform in 2010. This move increased the profit margin by eliminating the licensing fees to Broadsoft. This might have been another factor that made M5 attractive - margin. For the second quarter of fiscal year 2012, ShoreTel revenue was $58.0 million with a net loss of $1 million. Hardware alone is a difficult business to be in, ask Amazon or Dell.

Under the terms of the deal, M5 shareholders will receive approximately $84 million in cash and 9.5 million shares of ShoreTel stock, for a total of about $146 million on stock value at close of sale. Moreover, M5 shareholders have incentives that could realize up to $13.7 million, according to the company's press release.

M5 will be run as a separate division with CEO Dan Hoffman still managing things. This is a smart strategy; the same one that TelePacific took when it acquired Telekenex. The culture of CaaS is different than hardware / premise PBX. There is some rivalry there. Why break either corporate culture?

This transaction is just another example of how the legacy telecom world will have to jump into the new cloud world - mostly through buying since it will be cheaper and faster that building it from scratch.

Why can't the rest of the cloud comm space get this deal? One reason is that investors don't look at companies with less than $10M in revenue. You don't have a proven model at $4-5M. It's a different deal at that size. At over $20M, investors know that you can sell and you can scale. It's proven. Another reason was the average revenue per customer at almost $2000. As Q-Advisors told the crowd at Cloud Comm Expo in Austin in 2011, that number has to be north of a thousand to be attractive. Those are pretty good reasons for the 3x revenue number.

A Lesson From Netflix for You

2011-12-04T18:38:08Z

Netflix lost 800K customers last quarter. In this article, Netflix explains that it made some errors in communication and branding. Netflix did a poor job of communicating the price increase to its customers. It did a poor job of explaining its value proposition as well. I would suggest that many companies in our space have similar issues with customer communication, especially of the value prop.

One thing that came out of this situation for Netflix is that they raised their rates; hence, raising revenue even with almost 1 million customers left. One way to increase revenue is to raise your rates. One thing that companies fear is that if they raise prices they will lose customers. So what? Even losing 800K out of 24M, Netflix gained a big revenue jump.

One thing I try to stress is that it isn't really about how many customers you have, it is how many profitable customers you have!

Ask Kodak. In its fade to black, Kodak in 2001 lost $60 per camera sold. Many companies try to break even on hardware to make huge margin on consumables (like Xbox, printers, cameras, etc.).

In the move to managed services, carriers are realizing that customer interaction is very important. We don't know how this will scale, but I do think that the company that is most effective at delivering these services, especially ironclad security, will ultimately command the most customers and ARPU. At the end of the day it is about value that translates into ARPU (average revenue per customer) for any company. That value needs to be communicated effectively and clearly. Some of that is called Branding.

The Future of Media

2011-09-30T15:29:16Z

The buzz is that email is dead. Oh, voice is dying also. And if you believe all the hype, sell your airline stocks since video conferencing and tele-presence will replace travel.

"A company's corporate website is the top source of new sales leads--second only to personal connections and referrals, and more than seven times more effective than social media, according to a 2011 Demandbase National Marketing and Sales Study released today by marketing technology company Demandbase and online business network Focus, according to an article in the Tech Journal South. Yet the buzz says it's all social media.

Voice isn't dead either. If it was the contact center space would be folding up tents. Granted robo-calling is annoying, but it still won't end any time soon. (It just may get more challenging to reach humans instead of voicemail.)

Email is still my number one communication platform. Project management, clients, prospecting and more all happen via email. Notifications end up in email. When companies talk about unified messaging, it's about one inbox - the email tray.

Everyone has their preferred method of communicating: email, voice, text, chat, FB, twitter, and more. It is getting more baffling for people to keep track of conversation threads as they bounce from one medium to another - text to email to FB. But it all comes back to email - maybe mainly due to the inbox and inbox organization that we are used to. Texts, chats, notifications and more can all come back to an email inbox to be stored, organized and searched. That's why email will be around a while longer. Longer than you think anyway.

The future of media will be fractious at best.

Want an interesting look at new media?

What To Do in Austin Next Week

2011-09-06T17:19:38Z

Next week is the first time the ITEXPO West will be in Austin, TX. It's my first time in Austin (or Texas for that matter).

Once again, ITEXPO will be the home to a lot of great content. This time I am moderating two panels under the Social CRM Expo. Top 10 Tips for Online Marketing on Wed. at 2 PM with Shawan Vercher, Kyle Flaherty and Rusty Shelton. Then at 3 PM, Does Your Business have a Social Media Strategy? with Ronan Keane, Mike Langford, Simon Salt and Sanjay Popli. Following those 2 must attend sessions is the networking reception followed by Startup Camp from EMBRACE, where Robert Metcalfe will be the keynote address. Awesome! (I hope you registered for it already!)

There are many sessions going on at the same time all week. Check your program carefully or you will miss some good content and speakers.

The emphasis this year was to bring in more C-level presenters as well as some experts from outside telecom (like on my panels for instance). The CMO Summit on Tuesday night is for C-level execs to learn about branding and online marketing while mingling with their peers. (Be warned: no substitutes - CEO, CMO, President or VP of Marketing only!)

Another C-level networking opportunity is the Cloud Communications Summit, where EMBRASE has assembled a C-level cast of speakers plus a Social Networking Lunch & M&A Keynote.

The Channel Vision Expo will be happening on the show floor - a good place to learn how to sell this cloudy stuff. (Build it and they will come is a broken myth; you have to sell this stuff.)

Besides selling Cloud Comm, you have to on-board the customer properly. Katie Butcher at B-Lynk will be moderating an all-female panel of experts on on-boarding Hosted PBX customers.

If you can only make one day, make it Wed. Startup Camp, my sessions and the party!

Looking for the Gathering Over a Meal? That's Monday night. Looking to have a coffee and talk about the Industry, social media or your business? Email me or find me in the press room. See you in Austin!

Smoothstone Gets Bought

2011-04-20T20:47:51Z

Consolidation continues in the Hosted VoIP space as West Corporation, which owns Intercall, Intrado and other businesses, acquired Smoothstone today for $120M. This is on the heels of InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation and the world's largest conferencing and collaboration services provider, acquiring Preferred One Stop Technologies Limited ("POSTcti"), a leading provider of components, systems, professional services and hosted services for Unified Communications ("UC") in Europe on February 1st. [POSTcti provides Unifiied Desktop primarily].

This certainly helps West to become a big player in the Hosted UC space globally. SmoothStone expanded into Europe back in November (on the MPLS network of Masergy). SmoothStone, based in Louisville, KY, partnered with Sprint for fixed-mobile convergence and to extend the delivery of its Virtual PBX and Unified Communications services.

Intercall might gain some momentum as the conferencing arm for SmoothStone's cloud communications services.

As the giants like Cox, Comcast and XO begin to roll out Hosted PBX and versions of UC2 (unified collaboration and communications), consolidation is a must. Many of the cloud comm providers do not have the money, sales force, scale or network to compete head-to-head with the likes of Comcast.

Before this deal - valued at $120M - the largest Hosted VoIP deal I can recall was M5 buying Gekkotech to create a $40M player in NYC. With estimates that the VoIP services global market is nearing $50B already, there will need to be more consolidation to make a dent. Granted most of that $50M is SIP origination and termination that one day not too long ago was TDM - and that some of that is Skype, Vonage and MagicJack. But when you break it down to Hosted PBX, Packet8 is a $65M company -- so SmoothStone was a giant in this side of the sector.

IBM's New(er) Strategies

2011-03-29T04:17:56Z

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At IBM's Lotusphere this year (Feb. 1), IBM rolled out strategies for Cloud and Social Media.

IBM identified 5 ways that partners could benefit from the Cloud. They are as follows:

Cloud Application Providers - deliver business apps via a subscription model through the cloud such as SAAS
Cloud Builders - design, build and manage clients’ cloud needs, typically integrating with existing infrastructure.
Cloud Infrastructure Providers - provide a public cloud infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which app can be hosted.
Cloud Services Solution Providers - resell multiple public cloud services and offer complementary services such as training and integration.
Cloud Technology Providers - provide the tools, services, and technologies, such as cloud management, billing metering and monitoring — that help clients use the cloud more effectively.

These are ways for VAR's to stay in the business of providing applications and associated services.

According to some PR sent my way, " IBM is the largest consumer of social technologies. As a company, IBM takes social networking seriously - to develop products and services, to enable sellers to find and stay connected with clients, to train the next generation of leaders, and to build awareness of Smarter Planet among clients, influencers and other communities. IBM will showcase how it is poised to help clients exploit this transformation of a social business delivering new software, services and skills resources to help organizations adopt best practices, policies and software to transform their businesses, including: (1) New Cloud software and services that delivers a cloud-based office productivity suite; (2) New software to help companies and governments socially enable their business processes using the most successful mobile devices, including tablets, such as the iPad, iPhone, Google Android, RIM's Blackberry and Nokia devices."

See how they worked Cloud and social networking into that press release? Google Juice!

"IBM intends to offer a cloud-based version of LotusLive Symphony, an office productivity suite that will give organizations a social platform that enables them to simultaneously collaborate on documents in the cloud. LotusLive Symphony in the cloud complements IBM's on-premise, free of charge, office productivity suite, IBM Lotus Symphony." I didn't know IBM offered free office software.

In its collab suite, IBM will turn the inbox into the Activity Stream that feeds in twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and SAP through the Social Business toolkit. (Yeah, it says SAP in the release.)

Meetrix is an IBM Partner that offers IBM's enterprise-class Sametime Server in the Cloud. "Combining Meetrix with Broadworks Connector provides unique capability for Broadworks operators to deliver a full featured, over the top Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC 2) offering to business-class customers." Simple Signal is using this service. Meetrix is the only partner for Hosted Lotus Sametime presently, which allows Meetrix to offer "businesses access to enterprise-class UCC features such as instant messaging, chat, presence, awareness, document and presentation storage and sharing, audio and video, web conferencing and e-signature capabilities through SAAS." Note: digital e-Signature. [pr]

I'm guessing that this will compete against Microsoft Linc. I'm also guessing that the marketing and branding of this will take some time, which they don't have. The key may be the Activity Box and the digital e-Signature capabilities. At least, that's what I would be featuring in my marketing. It should be interesting to see, especially if other Broadsoft CLEC's jump on that wagon.

Why Do I Have To Give You That Info Again?

2011-03-01T16:10:43Z

Speaking with Fonolo CEO Shai Berger and I were talking last night about Call Centers and the lousy customer satisfaction. All the M&A activity creates pockets of technology and data and apps that cannot integrate easily with other pockets of apps, systems, data.

For example, a customer calls an 800 number of a company that bought two companies - and integration is complete. Except it isn't. The company uses a couple of call centers to fulfill customer service. Maybe one call center in Iowa on Genesis handling Product A; another in Chaicago on InIn handling Product B. These systems do not inter-operate. So the customer has to input his account number or other info more than once. Very frustrating.

Berger mentioned that zero out rates are between 30 to 50%! And companies spend lots of time and money on IVR systems, menus, choices. to no avail. Worse, he continued, is that customers then spend time venting at the CSR's, which translates into even more money burned up.

Call center jobs have already increased about ten thousand this year, as more business moves to the web. Probably the bankruptcies of brick-and-mortar stores like Borders/Waldenbooks and Blockbuster will ultimately result in less retail jobs, but more customer service jobs - at a call center.

It's an interesting case, as VoIP companies want to have zero touch installs, etc. However, they will need to ramp up call centers to handle the instances when that fails and other ancillary issues, like PC support that ISP's ultimately ended up handling.

VoIP companies likely won't have the same silo issue that telcos have, where the call center is a separate business from the marketing department, who ultimately owns customer satisfaction metrics. The call center people care about metrics - call times, zero outs, etc. - but those are just numbers. The bottom line is that the call center is not incented for customer satisfaction. (As I blogged yesterday, Retention is key as product pies flatten or shrink because customer acquisition costs rise.)

Fonolo's answer to the call center frustration is to offer an over-the-top IVR that will help increase customer satisfaction. It will also put some of the IVR power back in the marketers hands as opposed to the call center ops team.

Net-heads Grab the Gold Ring

2011-01-04T00:35:49Z

Over on Voyces Larry Lisser blogs about 4 communications startups that received funding in 4Q2010. (Pertinent because Communications Startup Camp is in less than a month on Feb. 3 at ITEXPO!) What made the story stand out for me is that all the innovation in communications is coming from Net-Heads not Bell-Heads. Software developers are shipping great Art.

Verizon coming up with another stupid slogan or the ability for a largely technophobic consumer to watch the same movie on 3 devices is not a great advance. I'll give them some credit for the social networks widgets, but again not easy for the general public to pull off.

Meanwhile Net-heads are making mashups; designing friendly UI; and allowing the small business to take full advantage of the web/apps/cloud.

For example, Tampa local's Charles Armstrong launched the iPhone app Tour Wrist in 2010 at TEDX Tampa Bay. User Generated Content (UGC and Web 2.0) mixed with feedback that is actually listened to and incorporated into upgrades and revisions. How is that app communications? You can send video postcards!

Another is SUTUS whose Business Central 200 allows small businesses to take full advantage of the cloud. This original box serves up to 25 users; the 4 new ones will be serving up to 40, as a single appliance to act as firewall, router with VPN, Wi-Fi access point, email server, file server and web server.

There are of course many others.

It will be the Net-Heads to bring Cloud Comm to the mainstream. Then the Duopoly will follow with me-too services.

Hear me talk more about Net-Heads at CVX Expo in Miami on Feb. 3rd at 3:15 on the show floor at the Channel Vision booth. Also, moderating the panel: VoIP/Telco 2.0 - The Emergence of Cloud Telephony on Feb 2nd at 11 AM.

Chat With JCurve About 2011

2010-12-16T01:51:10Z

Eli Johnson, Business Development Manager at J-Curve Technologies, chats with me for about 13 minutes about Broadsoft Connections 2010, Hosted UC and the obstacles that Cloud Communications providers face in the new year.

J-Curve offers Hosted PBX providers an outsourced customer service and tech support option.

Expectations in 2011 with Jon Arnold

2010-12-16T01:43:24Z

Jon Arnold joins me for a chat about what to expect in 2011. We touch on Acme Packet, SBC, security, outages, IPv4, Cloud and Social CRM. It's a full 25 minutes.

What's It Take to be a VoIP Winner?

2010-12-13T20:33:03Z

What does it take to run a successful VoIP services company? According to Report Linker, "the biggest VoIP providers are ostensibly run-of-the-mill telecom companies. This means smaller providers must innovate and take the role of pioneers whose marketing strategy doesn't rely only on offering the lowest price, since that's a game they can't win."

Lowest price is about scale. And as we have seen, just getting to 10K customers has taken most providers a long time (like 6-10 years). So lowest price - and the accompanying we-are-going-to-save-you-money speech - just won't cut it today. It isn't about revenue. It's about margin and profit.

A&P Grocery chain filed for BK today. It has been around 150 years. It ran on 2% return since 1998. It had bonds out there paying 8%. That won't work.

You would expect a 150 year old to know that. Apparently not. But they aren't alone. Many telecom/ITSP companies just want to book revenue and subscribers. That's like counting Facebook fans. What does it get you?

Some of your newer ITSP companies are doing unique things.

Alteva is betting on Microsoft with its Hosted OCS/Linc/Sharepoint/Exchange offering. It is so betting on that Hosted UC type offering that Alteva is wholoesaling that option to other ITSP's. Alteva thinks video will be disruptive, especially what comes out of the MS LINC integration. At the same time, Alteva is also betting on Broadsoft Hosted PBX and software integration. "Apps are stickier" is what Alteva CIO William Bumbernick told me during an interview. He also told me about some big college wins of 22K and 65k seats - without naming the colleges. The bonus was that these were agent sales, which ties in with Bumbernick stating that the ideal agent had bigger customers/connections. Hosted UC isn't for the small business, which is why they target more than 100 seats.

Hosted UC, especially video, needs more bandwidth. (See latest FCC report about broadband speeds.) Companies now looking for Hosted UC are medium sized according to AMI-Partners. Likely that means they have a CIO-type person who can roadmap the integration required for Unified Communications.

In other sectors of VoIP, we have Google Voice testing Call Recording. Sure, it has limitations, but then Google Voice has it's own impediments for many business. But Call Recording that is integrated into the Hosted VoIP offering, like PBX-Change offers through its CTI equipment, is what businesses are looking for. Plus it is that feature that becomes advantageous - and sticky.

Leasing is another advantage. Cisco has its program where it is helping ITSP's that use all Cisco products. (And Cisco Capital is telling VAR's that this is the new normal.) PAETEC and Tele-Pacific are CLEC's touting their own leasing programs.

Other areas of VoIP that can lead to a market advantage are zero-touch provisioning that Cbeyond and IBM are working on; translation service that Telcentris is rolling out; and SMS Integration (that's text integration), so your inbox looks more like your smartphone inbox, is something Telcentris is also working on.

What else are buyers looking for?

Basically, integration and simplicity. By that I mean, Google Apps integrated with Salesforce and other apps that the user needs.

Security. McDonald's customer data was hacked this month. Customers expect that data will be secure - until it isn't. That could be the cloud over cloud -- How reliable and secure is that Cloud Provider?

The one thing that will be a liability for ITSP's and VoIP Providers: not owning the network. We are knee deep in the Net Neutrality debate and it doesn't look good. Plus the Duopoly has stated that if the CLEC's don't like the pricing deal: Hey, go build your own network then!

It's more than just the pricing. Without owning the network, providers have to pay extra for quality of service. That raises the rate or takes away from margin. We'll see how this plays out, because unless the ITSP is integrated into the business processes of its customers to the point that the ITSP is a technology partner, pricing will be a factor - and network operators will win more deals, albeit with thinner offerings.

To win against cablecos who are fast becoming very large providers of digital VoIP, customer service and integration with marketplace advantageous features will be required.

Big Challenge Selling Hosted PBX

2010-11-09T19:44:00Z

On LinkedIn (in the Hosted PBX group), the question was asked, "What's the biggest challenge you face selling your solution to end users and/or channel partners?" Here are some of the answers.

Can the end user trust the service delivery of the provider? This is a big question because there have been some failures in VoIP delivery over the years. VoIP has taken somewhat of a reputation hit. Quality of Service is very important going forward. Resilienct, Dependable, Reliable, Secure, and Quality - key words to ease the customers' minds.

This dovetails into the problem of selling this solution. Hardly any two offerings are alike. Sure, the Broadsoft based providers have similar features, but they package them differently. This means that a channel partner has to learn not just a new product, some technical info, but specifically the difference between two ITSP offerings. IN telco world, the only difference between CLEC Integrated T1 bundles was how many minutes. See the disconnect?

Plus PRI is a standard. SIP Trunking is a garbage can of 30+ RFC's that get implemented differently by every carrier and vendor resulting in inter-operability issues never faced before. PRI was plug-and-play. SIP trunk is plug-and-pray.

Sales are slower with Hosted VoIP. They certainly can be. It's a purchasing shift for the end user. How many salespeople are enthusiastic about this incredible solution? How many can do Solution Selling to match up the correct pain points with the appropriate ITSP and network design?

One person mentioned that "We have found the hardest part is getting them to switch. Even though they will be saving a lot of money, it's hard to make the switch. Companies really worry they will miss calls..." As a sales trainer, my reply is that you failed in the sales process. It is a challenge, but if you progress through the questioning, the discovery, the obstacles, and still have hesitation, did you do testimonials? Demos? Did you undercover what the true objection is?

Another issue is "Will your company be around next week?" Handling that unasked question might be significant. Remember that SunRocket and others cratered leaving customers stranded.

Finally, Hosted PBX and UC Solutions are not replacement services. The customer isn't asking for Cloud or UC or some other buzz term. They have a business to run and just want the phone and email to work. Selling the same old way with next gen services is an uphill battle. The thinking that got you here, won't get you there.