Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter

On Rad's Radar?

| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Marketing

A Profitable Bundle

October 30, 2009

This PowerPoint presentation represents the outline of what my panel was going to discuss at Broadsoft Connections. We were going to make 3 points about Marketing a Profitable UC Bundle: 

  1. Does Bundling Work;
  2. How do you sell it;
  3. What makes a successful bundle

Does Bundling Work? It depends. Are you using a Bundle for Customer Retention or Customer Acquisition?



Posted in Marketing, apps, broadsoft, communications, sales and selling, unified communications

Personal Branding for Agents

October 5, 2009

I'm in Atlanta at the Microcorp event to moderate a round table for agents centered around sales and marketing. The title is Personal Branding. How do you promote your personal brand? 

When selling replacement commodity items, your brand may not be that important. However, when using the Consultative Sales approach or looking for the sweet spot in the role of Trusted Advisor, it is about your knowledge, skills, and reputation.

Posted in Marketing, agents, sales and selling, social network

People Won't Pay

August 14, 2009

If your model is free, how do you pay the bills? How do you pay for the infrastructure - the servers, switches, collocation, bandwidth, labor, etc.? How do you pay developers and engineers to scale it and keep it up?

Twitter is still free and so is Facebook. Popular too.

Posted in Internet, Marketing, economy, social network, twitter

Social Media is Like Dating

August 4, 2009

Last night was the WITI Tampa meeting with two social media experts - IBM's VP Sandy Carter and Tampa Bay's own Shawna Vercher.  

Sandy walked the audience through some social media lessons, including some homework on your Brand 2.0: Post 2 presentations to SlideShare; join LinkedIn and Facebook and connect with 50 people; and join twitter and tweet. Your brand is about experience, connection, promise and interaction. Social media helps you to give your audience (or marketplace) that. It can't replace face-to-face, but, as Shawna put it, it's a nice placeholder for you until you see them again. It's a way to stay top of mind. It's all about what you want your brand to be - offline and online. 

Other ways to utilize social networks to boost your brand are becoming an expert on LinkedIn Answers; creating how-to videos on YouTube; and increasing your search engine results with tagged video and photos (especially with a Flickr account).



Posted in Marketing, linkedin, social network, twitter

Verizon Profits Down

July 27, 2009

After dumping New England on Fairpoint and cashing in on that garage sale, Verizon bought Alltel. Now it is dumping more rural lines on Frontier. All of this is just Verizon's way of shoring up its stock report. Without the kickers from the Fairpoint transaction and the spurt from Alltel, my bet is that the company would be showing a loss.
Posted in Marketing, cellular, economy, fiber, wireless, wireline

Google Giving Voice to Startups

July 8, 2009

In a short article in INC magazine, one entrepreneur explains how he uses Google Voice for his startup business. He is a straddler - he has a full-time job while launching his own business. 

As noted by Ring Central, many of the features in Google Voice have been available for a while from VoIP Providers. However, it's partially the brand (it's Google) and partially the price (um, free). Once Google allows number portability, it will be tough to beat. Why?

For one thing, Raving Fans. Google has a lot of Raving Fans. And those fans tell stories about the service - even better than a testimonial.



Posted in Marketing, telecommunications, unified communications, voip

What Are You Selling?

June 26, 2009

While speaking at the FISPA meeting this week, I kind of focused on sales and marketing. Why? Mainly the E-Myth. Most of the ISP owners are technical but are very uncomfortable talking about business, marketing and especially sales. One point that is important is that ISP's are NOT selling Internet Access.

Posted in Internet, Marketing, apps, email, organizations, sales and selling, voip

Marketing Outrageously

June 26, 2009

In the book Marketing Outrageously by Jon Spoelstra, in Chapter 13, Jon writes about radio and TV advertising. Basically, you need to dominate a show or a channel to gain market share. Spoelstra doesn't talk about market share. He thinks it's about your brand being considered socially acceptable. PR firms want you to do Frequency and Reach.
Posted in Marketing, books

Whitacre Running GM

June 9, 2009

Former SBC chief Ed Whitacre is going to be the next Chairman of GM. Huh? According to Bloomberg, Whitacre is doing his patriotic duty and loves the challenge. Rich Tehrani thinks that Whitacre was a strategist.
Posted in Marketing, economy, off topic, politics, telco

VoIP Is Taking Off

June 7, 2009

The financial activity in the ITSP sector that I am seeing leads me to believe that the ITSP sector is taking off.
Although there have been analysts who think that IP Lines will slow down, I have to think that in the economic reality we are facing, the distributed workforce, the tele-worker, and the mobility of employees, more and more lines will move to VoIP. For cost savings as well as productivity reasons. 

If lines do slow down it will be due to the following reasons:
  • layoffs - less employees = less lines needed
  • mobility means less landlines needed
  • email, social networks, IM/chat, texting is replacing phone calls.
  • over all trend for less phone calls.
There are so many reasons for small and medium businesses (and self-employed persons) to migrate to VoIP that I don't see it being stagnant for long. 

Who to go with?
The one issue is the share number of VoIP Providers (with little differentiation) makes the decision difficult for the business owner. 

Premise versus Hosted
The premise hardware guys are selling their gear as if it was hosted at your site. Many business owners aren't familiar with having such a significant communication service outsourced (off property). It's a strange concept to wrap your head around.








Posted in Marketing, PBX, economy, sales and selling, smb, voip
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