sales and selling

All They Want is Sales

July 25, 2008

Most of my phone calls lately is How Do I Generate More Sales? It's getting tougher to sell telecom. For years it was all about "Saving 10%". Now that's not enough.

Posted in Marketing, sales and selling

Rich Tehrani has a post about magicjack. He saw one of the company's many infomercials. (Someone said that Isenberg is hawking them in one!) Anyway the one thing MJ is doing is promoting VOIP without talking about VoIP. Vonage does it as well.

Posted in Marketing, sales and selling, voip

Tele-Presence versus Video Conferencing

September 8, 2008

Andy Abramson writes about how video conferencing from a client company like SightSpeed is better than Cisco's Tele-Presence. On Sept. 22, Brian Carroll is having a tele-seminar on "Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting".

Posted in communications, sales and selling, tele-presence, telecommunications, video

Glaxo Cutting Salespeople

November 5, 2008

Pharma is having troubles anyway. Patents expiring on the Billion dollar drugs like Viagra. A trickle in the pipeline of new drugs. So today's announcement that GlaxoSmithKline plans to reduce its U.S.

Posted in off topic, sales and selling

Typical Situation

November 19, 2008

Typical Sales Situation: So I meet a prospective buyer. We exchange cards. A couple weeks later, he has a circuit need to be quoted. We have a conversation. It gets complicated.

Posted in agents, sales and selling, telco

Follow up to a Typical Situation

November 29, 2008

I wrote about a typical telecom sales situation about a week ago. Khali Henderson, editor of Phone+ magazine, has an editorial that talks about this type of scenario in the Channel. The conclusion of the story happened yesterday when the client called me to ask me to meet the direct AE's rate and send him a contract. My best Indirect rate is $1500 per month higher than the direct rate.

Posted in agents, sales and selling, telecommunications

The VoIP Channel

December 8, 2008

Why doesn't it get easier? Why is it so difficult to get agents to sell your stuff?

Over the years I have worked with many VoIP Providers. A good chunk of my consulting is on The Channel, Referral Systems, and Sales Compensation.

There are a number of landmines that can destroy a relationship with an independent sales agent.

Posted in agents, channel, sales and selling, voip

Bell-Head versus Net-Head

January 7, 2009

Discussing the economy on telecom sales today in some parts of the South, I was led to the following: Bell-Head versus Net-Head. What, you ask. Another way to ask it is Why can some folks sell TDM/POTS/PRI and why can some people sell VoIP?

VoIP is just an application, like UC, voicemail, and conferencing. That's Net-Head thinking. It's just eye pee!

VoIP is an unreliable step-sister to POTS.

Posted in agents, sales and selling, voip

Customer Retention is Job 1 for Agents

January 12, 2009

I blogged to my clients this morning that they need to be spending their time on customer retention as much as on acquisition. Then I got my Monday morning email that stated:

CUSTOMER RETENTION - If you aren't talking to your customers about renewing their contracts - trust me the Direct Sales force of Qwest, Verizon and AT&T ARE. All three carriers are using their Direct Teams to mine Agent accounts. - It cost more to get a new customer versus maintaining and growing your existing base.

HOW TO UPSELL IN A DOWN ECONOMY - Agent Quote - " If I'm not helping my customers with all their telecom needs, then someone else will." With it being the start of a new year now is the time to set up appointment with your top 25 customers and discuss their business and how you can help them. Don't assume they don't do conference calling because almost every business does these days. If you aren't talking to them about it, someone else will. Same holds true with wireless, disaster recover, data back up and collocation. Yearly audits are essential.

Posted in agents, sales and selling

Dave's Advice to Agents

January 13, 2009

Dave Rusin, CEO at AFS, has some advice on his blog for agents (or on xchange). I agree with this one point: "If I were an agent of any sort, I would focus on carriers that have competitive sustainability." However, when Mr. Enterprise CTO wants a quote from CLEC ABC, then as an agent we get one. That's how an agent stays in the picture.

Dave, you have never been an agent - and I would suggest that you haven't been an outside salesperson in the current climate.