Recently in TEM Category

There's a lot of buzz about TEM in the Industry now. Telecom Expense Management. It's about controlling the costs of telecom. It's a big expense especially for multi-location and Enterprise companies. 

TAM is telecom asset management which means it tracks cell phones and laptop data cards. Some TAM also tracks laptops, including Lojack style software to delete info from smartphones and laptops.

TEM is is used to track the following:

1. Contract expiration - so you can notify the carrier before the auto-renewal kicks in
2. Contract terms - how much, how long, etc.
3. Billing reconciliation - 10% of all bills are wrong I am told.
4. Hidden charges -  I'm doing a panel on this - many hidden charges.
5. Circuit location - circuits don't routinely get disconnected as they should. If you close an office or downsize, you want to do the same with the circuits
6. Spending - are conferencing, long distance or cellular minutes increasing?

Today, businesses need to contain costs. TEM is the way to do that. For agents, it's another way to be valuable and to make some dough.

In speaking with Microcorp today about their agent event in October in Atlanta, we were discussing a panel on Trends for 2010.  It's not so much about the vendors, it's about the services that the vendors are offering that will become the next revenue stream for the channel.

This ties in with a TCA listserv discussion about Alternative Streams of Revenue for the Channel Agents. TCA will be hosting an agent call about Electricity with a couple of agents who have been selling electricity to businesses in unregulated states for a while. (Paetec offers this to agents as well).  Other topics include Web Strategy (like Lead Generation through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing); SAAS; 4G; the Cloud; and Managed Services.

It won't be enough to just sell TDM in the future, you will need partners to offer Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and Auditing as well as all the new services coming down the pipe (electricity, SAAS, cloud, 4G, VOIP, SIP Trunking, etc.). 

Maybe we are heading into Master Agency 2.0 - the dawn of an era when the master agent will have to be more than a collection of carrier contracts. What do you see that you might need from your Master Agency in the future? Let me know. Thanks.

For those agents out there that attend ACC Business training at Channel Partners Expo over the years, you will notice that Dan Morford is missing this year. ACC Business let him go during their layoffs in December. The good news is that MicroCorp hired Dan Morford as Product Manager of their Insite Inventory software application. As product manager, Mr. Morford will be responsible for managing the pre-sales and post-sales support of the Insite application. In addition, he will help drive all product enhancements and work directly with MicroCorp's application development staff.

"I'm very enthusiastic about the opportunity to join an entrepreneurial company that has bold plans to provide value-added tools to their agents, VARs and end customers. I've known MicroCorp for years and have always admired their integrity and progressive nature. I am truly excited to be a part of the MicroCorp team and look forward to contributing to the success of the company," states Mr. Morford.

That means that Microcorp is putting some muscle behind this differentiating app in 2009. It's one more tool for Microcorp agents to use to get in doors and to upsell the base.

It is getting tough out there, as the news keeps repeating as nauseum.
Businesses are laying off and closing. If you can maneuver in this environment, then opportunity awaits. No I haven't been drinking. Let's examine things.

Layoffs means companies have to be more efficient and more productive with less. What does that mean? Technology needs to be applied and work.

Budgets for travel are slashed, but people still have to connect/communicate.

Legislation is in place forcing IT teams to work harder.

The message is that Unified Communications can save you. So can Tele-Presence, Video/web/audio conferencing, hosted email, SAAS, VoIP/Hosted PBX, and that over-used term "managed services".

If the IT staff is short handed, but still has to do data storage, email archiving, and other DR/BC and regulatory processes - it can be outsourced.
And you can sell it. Gartner just did a paper on Hosted Email which spells out the Return on investment for using Hosted email. IBM Lotus, Microsoft Office, and Google Apps are looking for VAR's.  What's a VAR? An agent that stepped up.

At a VAR Kick-Off meeting, Cisco emphasized touching the customer. The box got them into the client with switch and router sales. Now the trick is to upsell the out-dated boxes and to add security modules to as many sales as possible. That's the Upsell. After security, comes VoIP and Collaboration (Webex, Web 2.0, UC). Cisco has designed the sales road map for its VAR Channel.

Do you have a road map, sales flow chart or other process in place to help your agents move from selling transactional services like DSL, cell phones, POTS, PRI, Integrated T1 to complex sales like Hosted PBX, Metro Ethernet, and Managed Services like firewall, backup, intrusion detection, DDOS Defense and SAAS. Remember, SAAS is the bucket that Hosted PBX, Secure Email, and Hosted Exchange fall in.

To become a rainmaker, you must make a fundamental shift in thinking from:
"How can I close this sale?" to "How can I create a relationship that will benefit the customer and my company in the long run?" 

There is a lot of buzz about recasting and renewing. Should agents be paid?
Should carriers grab that renewal?  This would not be an issue at all if you owned the relationship with the customer. By owned I mean that you are providing the client with enough added value that he wouldn't want to go direct to the carrier. I always explained it that I was the Outsourced Telecom Provisioning department. I am the go-to guy for any questions about telecom (and by extension IT). Don't you want to be in that position?

There has been buzz around TEM since 2006. In an economic downturn (kind of like we are experiencing now), telecom expense management can play a real role. Hand-in-hand with auditing, TEM is a way to get the attention of the prospective buyer. Personally, I have a distaste for the "I'll save you money pitch", but its what resonates with most people. 

Today, businesses have to do more with less - including less people. So along comes something like Microcorp's INSITE (video demo here and podcast here), with its inventory control module and now companies can tell what they have, where, how much it costs, etc.  So when a firm lets 10% of its staff go, it should reduce its telecom spend as well. (It is not unusual to find companies with "ghost lines" or 40 lines with 25 employees).  Insite is very well suited for multi-location businesses.

Another form of inventory managemnt would be the Lojack for Laptops. According to the Fast Company article, "Companies lose billions of dollars a year in hardware and data".  Laptops and cell phones go amissing = lost dollars for the company.

"Absolute Software.. has developed software that lives in a notebook computer's motherboard and pings Absolute's headquarters with its online IP address. The daily pings let companies keep up-to-date lists of where their computers are around the world and notify them if a ping comes from an unexpected location. Customers can trigger a code to wipe a machine's hard drive from afar... The technology is called Computrace." [Fast Company]
 

There is the other side of TEM: low barrier to entry, almost Amway like - as Dave Rusin writes here. But TEM requires stories, referrals, testimonials, because quite simply, the person doing the TEM activities now doesn't want to be out of job if your magic potion actually works. So talk to those CFO's and utilize the leverage that can be TEM.

December 8, 2008 - In its annual twelve day count down of hot telecom and data services that their members should watch in the next year, Telecom Association ("TA") choose MicroCorp's telecom inventory management tool "Insite" on the first day.

"In 2009, because of the economy, business owners and managers will focus on getting more out of the telecom and data services they already have", stated TA Founder Dan Baldwin.

MicroCorp's Insite is a contract and carrier agnostic telecom inventory management tool that helps telecom consultants, agents, and their business clients answer the obvious question, "What are the telecom and data services I already have?"

Baldwin added, "Few multi-location small businesses have a professionally built online management tool that helps them track the productivity of the telecom and data services they've subscribed to. Most simply pay the bills as they come in, forgetting what the services were even ordered for. 'Insite' solves this problem by giving an ongoing updated look into all subscribed telecom services that the business customer can view and their telecom agents or consultants can manage from".

Insite is "contract agnostic" in that it does not matter what carrier or contract term the customer currently has. Whatever the telecom or data carrier, the information from the customer's current telecom and data bills go into Insite. Once Insite is set up, both the customer and the consultant, agent or channel partner can see what the customer is paying for on a monthly basis so all involved can more easily manage the services to achieve maximum savings.

Insite is very well suited for multi-location businesses that currently try to track all their locations' telecom and data invoices on manual spreadsheets.

See the links below or visit the following web page to listen to an audio podcast about Insite or view a screen video about how Instie works.

http://www.telecomassociation.com/pubs/12days/1/1_index_press_release.htm

ABOUT MICROCORP - MicroCorp Inc. is a telecommunications convergence company that provides multi-vendor solutions to business customers nationwide. MicroCorp customers receive best-of-breed Telecom and ASP solutions from vendors such as Sprint, Qwest, AT&T, MCI, XO, ACC Business, Internap, Raindance, Level 3, and more. MicroCorp products are distributed nationally via a network of over 1,500 employees, agents, system integrators and VARs.
Founded in 1986, MicroCorp Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1995 MicroCorp Inc. became a graduate member of The Advanced Technology Development Center, which is located on the campus of The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. MicroCorp can be reached at 770-649-1919 or www.MicroCorp.com.