On Rad's Radar? - TEM Archives

The Alternate to Cloud

2012-08-15T20:09:00Z

For Agents that just don't want to go cloud, there are some alternatives. In my latest book, SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud Services, there are a few products that Agents can sell that still fall inside the Replacement services umbrella. T1, broadband, cellular, voice are all replacement services for the transactional agent. That road is bumpy. It won't take much for you to make some extra revenue.

One way is SIP Trunking. Everyone offers it. Find someone you like and trust and sell that, although if you are reading this blog, you probably are selling SIP Trunking already.

Next up is Conferencing. Web, audio and video conferencing are coming of age. Most companies use some kind of conferencing, you just have to get in the habit of asking about it. It's as easy as asking them if they use Webex. Then go into your pitch about quoting them a cheaper rate. You will see a couple of conferencing companies with booths at CPExpo in Orlando in 3 weeks.

Another easy one is efax. If you are selling VoIP, what do your customers do about faxing? One answer is efax from you.

One more quick one for your customers is email. Hosted MS Exchange, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Office 365, Zimbra, Zoho and Google Apps are all answers to the email question. Almost all of them pay you a commission through a vendor. (Google doesn't.) Zoho just rolled out email marketing into their suite of services. J2 bought Landslide.com to create CRM with email marketing. J2 also sells efax. Faxbetter.com is owned by my pal and is always looking for partners to sell 50+ numbers. The efax and email space are a nice little sale that will make you money.

Now to hit two bigger options that may be considered SAAS, but them conferencing, efax and email are all cloud services too. Just most folks don't look at it that way.

Telecom Expense Management is finely coming into its own. Many master agencies - like PARTNERIQ by TBI, INSITE from Microcorp - are offering TEM. Your typical medium sized business problem has more than one contract for telecom. Multi-location businesses have a number of circuits at each location. TEM allows for the centralization and organization of billing and contract data. If you sell it, you end up being the outside telecom department for that business. Isn't that what you want? That's always been my goal.

The final thought for Agents is MDM, mobile device management. There are so many reasons to offer MDM. "One laptop is stolen every 53 seconds! 70 million smartphones are lost each year, with only 7 percent recovered."

"MDM is in essence software that secures, monitors, manages and supports mobile devices deployed across mobile operators, service providers and enterprises and its s main objective is to provide a high level of security on a mobile communications network, while supporting multiple devices and continuing to reduce cost and downtime," writes TMCnet. TDMobility and MetTel are just a couple of vendors that offer agents and VAR's the MDM service to sell.

TEM and MDM offer "a complete view of customer spend, billing; Inventory and trouble ticket management." They are a way for you to differentiate yourself from other agents and other sales teams, while increasing your own profitability per account.

We hear a lot of talk about cloud - and technically these are cloud too - but you have to add to the catalog of services you offer today to become a trusted advisor. TEM and MDM are just two ways to have a value based conversation with your customers.

3 Things Agents Need to Look at in 2012

2011-12-30T21:14:19Z

It will be a busy year in 2012 as all the carriers try to synergize their mega-mergers and get their back-office in order so that we can actually place orders.

Besides selling the traditional circuits - POTS, T1, SIP, PRI - there are some interesting things for an Agent to look at in 2012.

M2M is growing. We are seeing that the 3G/4G system is creeping in everywhere - from broadband backup systems to surveillance systems to fleet management to home healthcare monitoring to security monitoring. There are an unlimited number of ways that devices and the wireless network can interact. Think about the Kindle. There is money to be made in M2M.

More wireless but mixed with TEM. If you haven't moved your big accounts to TEM, 2012 may be the year you think about it. Auditing has increased in the last two years as governments (local, county, state) and medium businesses look for ways to reduce the ever-increasing telecom bills. (Cellular/3G/4G is big and growing, which is increasing the total cost of telecom spending.) Telecom Expense Management (TEM) can help accounts that spend more than $5K per month. It also makes the Agent the point person all the total telecom spend. It's a great way to become vital to the organization.

In addition, you can add Mobile Device Management. If a company has more than 250 employees, it likely needs help tracking laptops, data cards, cellphones and the like. There are software platforms for this to make an Agents life easy. This is yet another way to become integral to a clients business. Notice I'm not suggesting selling cellphones, but manage those assets for the business.

Lastly, there is Cloud and Managed Services. I'm going to skip cloud unless you want to sell apps to businesses. If you sell within a vertical, I would suggest that you certainly start selling apps into that vertical, because it will add revenue for you and make you the go-to person for all things IT and Telecom for that Vertical!

In Managed Services, we are seeing a few trends: hacking is increasing; security is lax; IT is pervasive in today's business environment but there is not enough money or staff to handle it all. That's where managed servcies comes in. If the company has a lot of empployees and a small IT staff, managed servcies would be a fit. Things to ask:

"What task would you like to relieve yourself of?"
"What routine task could we outsource to your ISP to free up your staff's time?
"You are consuming a lot more bandwidth, what are you doing about firewall and other security?"
"How are you tracking wireless spending and devices?"
"What would you do if a company laptop was stolen or lost?"
"How much private company data is on a smartphone or laptop? How much access does either device have to your network?"
"Do you backup your data regularly and off-site?"

You have to adjust for the changing times, unless you just want to push pipes. But your customers are under a strain to handle devices, billing, auditing, tracking as well as security and more. You can make some extra money -- and become more than just a sales guy -- if you move beyond the pipes and help your customers with the rest of the story. HUH? They buy those pipes from you for a reason. Help them with that.

Happy New Year!

Frontier Gets Cell Service, Agents Should Too

2011-11-18T18:23:01Z

Frontier Communications has inked a deal to be a channel sales agent for AT&T for voice and data cellular plans, as reported by the Fool. "This was a natural extension of a product that we are not currently offering that would fit well with our product suite," Steve Crosby, Frontier's senior vice president of government affairs and public relations. At least they realize that cellular is an important part of the total telecom send. Do you?

When master agent,TBI, launched its SAAS-based TEM platform, Geoff Yearack, director of TBI's wireless division, stated that it was a way to aid agents with getting some of the wireless spend of clients.

Agents have to start looking at ways to get more of the telecom wallet as that budget is absorbed into the IT budget. The simple approach is to offer TEM to your clients. Another approach is to offer asset management. To tie into cyber-security , laptops, data cards, mi-fi gadgets, tablets and smartphones not only need to be tracked by businesses but secured against data theft and loss.

Cbeyond, XO, TelePacific and other CLEC's are offering cellular plans in conjunction with Dynamic T1 and other services. With the average T1 price at an all time low, it's one way to increase ARPU or MRR -- and in turn, increase commissions.

Sprint recently raised $4B in a debt offering in order to pay for network upgrades for "iPhone and its Network Vision network modernization plan". Rumor is that some of it will be used for Clearwire build-out, which seems likely given that Clearwire has some of Sprint's spectrum and has been Sprint's 4G partner. How do you hang that up now? But it goes to show that even after the billions already spent by the the cellcos - VZW, ATT, Sprint, Clearwire, and even MetroPCS - billions more will have to be spent to -- not buy more spectrum -- but to just deploy the spectrum they are currently sitting on, for tower backhaul and for network management. Big pie there that Agents need to take a piece of.

What's New to Sell?

2010-10-19T03:16:22Z

Besides thinking Cloud, which is really just applications, there have been a few interesting product offerings from carriers. Here are some of them:

Both AboveNet and FiberLight have some new fiber miles to sell.

XO has almost 100 route miles of new metro fiber in Charlotte (with help from AGL and DukeNet). That helps XO offer bigger pipe (like FastE) to go with EoC. XO is pushing E-SIP over MPLS. They are also offering VPLS for those IT folks that don't more control than MPLS offers.

Savvis has a new data center in Atlanta and opened DC #4. Savvis is also pushing MPLS with IAAS for the customer that wants private cloud computing infrastructure or needs to securely connect to their hosted apps. Savvis is obviously looking for Enterprise, Government or Fortune 5000 clients for their new portfolio.

Level3 announced Coverged Business Network service, which means pick two or more of these services on one pipe: Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), IP-VPN, and SIP Trunking voice services.

New Edge Networks and XO both offer EVDO backup for small businesses that need redundancy. EVDO backup allows for a diverse path for access.

New Edge Netwroks (soon to be married to Deltacom) is offering $289 T1 in 450 cities and $499 for a T1 with DSL or EVDO backup bundle.

GSI is doing auditing and TEM.

2011 will be interesting!

4 Opportunities for Agents

2010-10-18T14:45:14Z

Microcorp is a master agent that I have dealt with since 2003. Their agent conference is this week. The focus is on Get Away from T1. Well, that's not the official theme, but that is the message.

It started with a panel I moderated this morning on Demystifying the Cloud. It's a paradigm shift to move from Layer 2 to Layer 7; to move from access to applications and hosting. Hosting is the Cloud. Amazon, iTunes, Google Apps, Hotmail are all examples of the Cloud.

Everyone has heard of Salesforce.com, the $1.3B SAAS provider of CRM software. I remember when they were at ISPCON as an ASP (with Jamcracker) trying to push the application as a service model. But this was before ubiquious broadband, 3G and smartphones. Today, SAAS is a productivity move, not a just a cost saver.

Other opportunities were introduced by a panel of agents. Marty Lyman at Compass Solutions sells Hosting, so he understands SAAS and The Cloud.

Conference calling has helped Doug Sammak of VATIC Outsourcing expand his protfolio of business. Allan Watkins of Total TeleCom Management has added TEM (telecom expense management) to get into the businesses that spend more than $15K per month.

Melissa Stafford of Converge Solutions holds the record for the most diverse carriers sold. Her business is not focused on a product set or carrier, but on whatever the customer needs in the overall telecom and IT space. She understands that today it is about getting the most share of the Total Telecom & IT Spend of the customer.

Education is available everywhere. (That thing called the Information Superhighway has a wealth of information to help you and your business).

3 Ways VARs Can Profit From Cloud

2010-10-11T16:54:29Z

I was speaking to an IT shop owner this morning who will be attending SMB Nation in Vegas in a couple of weeks. His worry is How Do I Make Money From The Cloud?

Agents have a similar worry. One reason agents worry is because selling Managed Services in Consultative Selling is very different than selling a PRI or T1. Very Different!

It's transition time - time to take some sales training (Call RAD-INFO!)

For value-added resellers who sell IT services, the Cloud is still an opportunity. Here's 3 ways VAR's can profit from the Cloud:

One: partner with SAAS providers to get residual commissions from customers you bring to them. It isn't much money, but every stream of income counts. (I'd rather have 25 small streams of income than 1 big one).

Two: someone has to the integration and migration. Migrating databases to SAAS requires labor. IT shops can get paid for that. Integration with the SAAS provider and the client company employees is another space that needs to be filled. (VAR's could just re-bill the SAAS with a support or management fee).

Finally, the management piece. Remember, that not every application and certainly not all data will be moving to the cloud. Some of it will be a hybrid solution of private cloud and public cloud. You know what becomes important? Access, security and backup.

By Access, I mean ways to access the data in the cloud: Internet Access, MPLS or VPN. With Redundancy and reliability, too.

By security, I mean that private clouds coupled with lots of government regulations mean that security on the WAN as well as the LAN will be important - and likely too complicated for any in-house tech department. Access to the Access, if you will.

Lastly, data backup, email archiving and storage will be even more important as we move to the cloud. Someone has to manage that. It could be you.

In the Agent World, we have TEM and TAM. VAR's will need something similar.

TEM is telecom expense management (and sold as software-as-a-service, btw). Even circuits that I did not sell to the customer can be checked and inventoried on a TEM platform. Bill reconciliation is one piece of it, but also as offices open and close, employees leave and join, connections will need to be moved, changed, added or terminated. TEM helps to watch all that.

Close to that is TAM, telecom asset management. Laptops, EVDO cards, cellphones, data cards, routers, switches, IP phones - all these hardware assets that an employee or very small office may have - need inventory management. When the employee leaves, don't you want his hardware back? Don't you want to know how many data cards and data plans are in service? TAM.

VAR's could do something similar. In the security realm, companies would like to know that when they fire Al, he can be locked out of all data, systems and networks. That's your job!

Seth Godin says a Linchpin manages chaos, makes the complex simple. That's the Value.

TEM and TAM

2009-08-25T16:00:07Z

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:

Contract expiration - so you can notify the carrier before the auto-renewal kicks in
Contract terms - how much, how long, etc.
Billing reconciliation - 10% of all bills are wrong I am told.
Hidden charges - I'm doing a panel on this - many hidden charges.
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
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.

Trends for 2010

2009-08-24T17:35:44Z

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.

Where is Dan Morford?

2009-01-23T17:57:48Z

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.

Agents Need to Morph into a VAR

2009-01-22T16:25:58Z

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?

Asset Management for Money

2009-01-05T16:39:40Z

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.

Microcorp Insite is Insightful Now

2008-12-09T04:51:06Z

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.