Intermedia was the first. They ended up selling to MCI due to the amount of short term debt that was due. (Reminder: don't acquire companies using an AMEX card!)
PAETEC hit a billion and sold to Windstream.
Cbeyond only made it half way there before looking for a buyer. Eventually Birch bought them.
EarthLink hit a billion. That is all. Tried a lot of stuff, not a lot worked. Today they are making a niche play in retail, while trying to figure out what to do with the fiber network.
XO hit a billion and became totally irrelevant for a long while until Verizon decided to buy them. That seemed to ignite a fire in the belly of XO.
Covad and other DLECs tanked quickly after Big IPO's, because it was just too difficult to navigate the waters of telecom (especially without a C-Suite with that kind of domain knowledge. Next time hire a former SVP or EVP from a LEC!) Google Fiber is seeing those same problems, stumbling its way to less than 250K subscribers in 5 years of labor and marketing hype.
In Jim Collins Built to Last, some of the elements to lasting success are Culture, BHAGs (vision and goals) and home-grown management (talent development). It has to be about more than the race to a billion.
I see this with UC and Cloud companies. Many of them on a race to a Billion. It should only be a race to get 25,000 profitable customers. Then 35K, then 40K, then 50K. And that will be a big business right there.
But NO!!! It has to be a Unicorn! What a stupid attitude. I see it over and over. I want thousands of partners. I want to sell from 1-1000 employees. But the clock is broken. The systems and procedures suck. There isn't a culture of excellence.
Heck, even college athletics departments know about building a culture of excellence.
I can see a couple of the big UC companies struggling and eventually failing. It isn't about what can you sell. It IS about what can you Deploy and Support!
The process to deploy 20 seats is NOT the same as the process to deploy 500 seats.
BE A CLOCK BUILDER, NOT A TIME TELLER - Jim Collins
]]>CenturyLink says "The future state of enterprise IT is going to be far more complex and heterogeneous than today. CenturyLink realizes this and is today rolling out the product updated to give people more choice." C-Link launched new some new services called Bare Metal Servers, AppFog, and WordPress-as-a-Service.
Why formally learn? For one reason, our industry is transforming before our eyes with new products, services, technology, buyers and sales processes. You might need to pick up a few things to stay relevant.
For less than $300 you can take the TCA Certified Telecom Professional course and exam to learn about all things telecom and cable.
You could join CompTIA and gran some certifications in a number of areas.
There are a couple of online academies like Udemy and SkillShare, where you can learn skills like coding or how to be a freelancer or marketing. And you can teach courses on these platforms. Good way to be seen as The Expert.
Road Shows and Expos. The Wearable Tech Expo in Vegas, CP Expo in Boston and the various carrier and master agency road show are just a few of the places to learn about new tech.
For example, TelePacific holds partner events throughout its territory. (I spoke at one of them.)
Another example, "CenturyLink is going on tour to the IT community about the emerging cloud services trends that are affecting IT departments inside businesses via a multi-city tour that will feature industry analysts and the telco's customers." (You might be able to interact with buyers there, but register those deals during a bio break!)
Finally, vendors provide training. Maybe not always good training, but training nonetheless. Online and live, there are a number of opportunities to grab some education. Netwolves has some good stuff on their security offerings. Masergy has managed security training for partners. RapidScale has a cloud university.
You aren't spending your time on learning -- you are investing in your career, business and future. Best way to handle it is with an appointment for 30 minutes to an hour in your calendar every week. Or at least read 20 minutes per day- perhaps my book (available on your kindle).
"Training takes time. But it's the best lifelong investment a person can make." #gitomer
]]>Hire Weird
It's not about the tech, but what it can do for the people.
Be Helpful. Customer Service and Your People are the
"Leadership is about creating meaning, not telling them what to do."
It's only a commodity if you treat it as such.
]]>Last week I gave a presentation on How to Compete to ISP and CLEC owners at the AT&T HQ in Atlanta. I recommended two books: Poke the Box by Seth Godin and Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. I would suggest reading Seth Godin's other books, like Tribes, Permission Marketing, Linchpin.
My kindle is full and I have a stack of books to read this summer. Here are my suggestions.
Last year, I wrote about Brad Thor's book, Black List, a spy novel with all too real insights into our military-industrial complex. His next book is out: Hidden Order.
Hugh MacLeod's new ebook is out, Authenticity Is The New Bullshit. A free ebook about How Not to Suck!
FreshBooks is an accounting software for SMBs. They put out an ebook, Breaking the Time Barrier, about how to charge what you are worth. (It isn't about time but Value and Outcome.)
I'm also reading CompTIA's State of the Channel Study on channel conflict.
The Cloud Comm Alliance put out an ebook about selling cloud comm to enterprise. I think my book, SELLECOM2, is better :)
The Small Business Lifecycle: a Guide for Taking the Right Steps at the Right Time by Charlie Gilkey. It's about the 4 stages of a business and what is needed at each stage. Dry like a textbook but good info.I love spy novels and mysteries. I am reading a lot of Lawrence Block right now. Just got Daniel Silva's new book, The English Girl, in the mail. Brad Thor reminded me that Vince Flynn, another great author in the same vein as Brad Thor, Barry Eisler and Daniel Silva, died in June. A lot of my favorite authors have passed away. Either I am getting old or they are dying young.
What are you reading?
]]>Obviously, the more you practice, the better your muscle memory gets, the better the serve gets.
Now visualization is two-fold. It is what you see in your mind's eye and whet you tell yourself. So if you can visualize how the action should go, it will likely happen. Visualization allows you to focus too.
What you tell yourself matters. If you stand at the service line thinking "Don't Miss. Don't Miss." You are going to miss. It's the wrong way to talk to yourself. You should be talking to yourself in the positive - "Serve it to that person. I will serve it to that spot."
In business (and in life), we don't put nearly enough emphasis on the way we talk to ourselves and on what we visualize. Top athletes do, but then they have a coach.
Did you know that top executives also have coaches? Some business people treat business like a sport; thus, they have trainers, coaches, and a team of support personnel to help them to success.
My coach used to say that Wealth is a team sport - you can't do it alone.
]]>This week marks the completion of my third book. SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud Services is now available in paperback from Lulu.com. The kindle version is being formatted as we speak.
In the book, tthe three major themes are:
The book is targeted at agents, VAR's and direct sales people to give them something to think about and some concrete ideas - and open ended questions - to use to get in the cloud game and make some sales. I am launching it with a 4-week sales training course. Details are available in the slidedeck.
"Not a single company that qualified as having made a sustained transformation ignited its leap with a big acquisition or merger. Moreover, comparison companies--those that failed to make a leap or, if they did, failed to sustain it--often tried to make themselves great with a big acquisition or merger. They failed to grasp the simple truth that while you can buy your way to growth, you cannot buy your way to greatness." --Jim Collins/Time
"Be the best. It's the only market that's not crowded." - from: Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America, George Whalin.
]]>The Arab Spring of 2011 was a similar model: change was coming in the form of popular protests, furthered by social networks and the Internet, fought bitterly and fatally by the regimes in place, but to what end? Many dead and injured BUT CHANGE HAPPENED ANYWAY!
Many thought that after Napster, the music industry would stop being stupid and embrace the new music distribution models evolving. The Industry didn't, but the artists who did - like OAR, Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam (to name a few of my favorites) - have been hugely successful and profitable.
Why can't the rest of the Industry see that?
Radio is one way to listen to music, but let's face it, listening to the same 100 songs plus the syndicated DJ's is annoying. Because of consolidation in radio station ownership, the powers that be can only look at the bottom line. Wrong place to look. **Successful businesses think about Employees and Customers **(in that order). From that viewpoint can a successful business model is executed.
Albert Einstein said, "Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value." I take that to mean, "Give Value First and Foremost." All else flows from that.
With SOPA and ProtectIP, the RIAA and the MPAA hope to legislate morals nd protections. Why? Why not just give your customers what they want, the way they want it? Isn't that what a vendor is supposed to do?
After Napster, there were numerous other P2P sites like Limewire that popped up. Then a number of online radio sites, like Pandora, Grooveshark, Spotify, Rdio, and more. All have had some fight with the RIAA over licensing. Now we have Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and Apple's iCloud, too. Do you see a pattern here? People want to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want, on the device of their choosing.
My buddy suggested that their be a website to donate directly to an artist. For example, you downloaded - legally or illegally - a song or album that you liked so much, you wanted to give some money to the artist. That's not a bad way to do it.
One comedian, Louis CK, who is maybe a B list-er, just made over $1 million in revenue on a comedy show, Live at the Beacon, that he produced and distributed himself online at $5 per copy.
The Internet works as a model for distribution. The content is key. CK proved that. So do many authors who self-produce on Lulu and Kindle. [Maybe the key is micro-payments, which I will define here as anything under $6.]
TechDirt is probably the one website that I read that is on top of the copyright-distribution-legislation issues. In a recent article, TechDirt kind of sums up the consumer thinking that WB (and others in the Netflix fight) don't understand: "It appears that WB is implicitly admitting that the strategy of delaying the rental period of a movie by 28 days has been a total failure, in the decision to increase the delay to 56 days. They're basically admitting that not enough people were "buying" in those 28 days... so they somehow think that doubling the wait will increase the purchases. It won't. If people really want to pay the extra money to buy the DVD, they're likely to do so pretty early on. It's not like they're waiting 50 days in and then saying "gee, I can't rent the movie, so I'll just pay a lot more money than necessary to own an obsolete piece of plastic." " BINGO!
People want to stream their content - video, music, TV, movies, etc. - through whatever device they have - blu-ray, xbox, PS3, Roku, GoogleTV, AppleTV, laptop, tablet, etc. [Same holds true for blogs, magazines, and books.]
TechDirt goes on to explain, "I do believe that [MPAA and RIAA] current strategies of alienating their best customers, relying on government protection, and pretending this is some sort of epic battle between good and evil aren't just doomed to fail, they're actively making things worse for themselves." [Sounds a lot like telco doesn't it?]
I'm not encouraging piracy. I actually despise it. We live in an immediate gratification culture. Vendors have to accept that.
We also live in an age where people expect a lot for free. Facebook is free, but people still bitch about it. So's this blog and same thing. Our Culture has a high expectation. It's about perceived value.
Content is really important. Government has to keep the masses entertained or they will revolt.
However, we have a spiraling problem: content costs a lot to make, while disposable income in America is declining. That combination is a disaster waiting to happen.
Let's look at the NFL. They just raised their fees to the TV channels that carry them by 60-70%! [Alan Quayle has a good piece on it.] So ESPN, which is already the most expensive TV channel for service providers to deal with, will be raising its rates to cover this cost. Even the extra $3.50 is just for one channel. What about all the other channels?
I have a rant about ESPN in general anyway. Are they really a sports channel??? Besides college bowl games and some college basketball, the only sport it televises is Monday Night Football, which had bad games all year. This creates a brand issue for them. PBA, Poker and other non-sport stuff is cheap to produce but it is just filler, since they can't run talk-shows and Sportscenter all day (just most of it). ESPN has the same issue as the music and movie industry: too much looking at profit, not enough good content to warrant the money.
We are seeing cord cutting, because the consumer dollars are decreasing -- and they would rather give up TV than cellphones. Cellphone bills average more than residential line bills used to. For a family of 4, it is easily 4 times what the home phone used to cost. Granted you can do more with it, but dollars are dollars. And with 16% of the population at poverty level start thinking what that means for the service economy engine - and all types of businesses.
You have economic and technological forces working to breakdown old school content systems. It will be interesting to see if any lessons are learned and applied in 2012. I highly doubt it because:
]]>The rest of the time I am reading blogs, articles, magazines, analysis, SEC filings and business books and writing.
Here are books I thought were good:
I think if you aren't reading, you aren't learning. And there is a lot to learn to keep ahead of the competition.
If you have any good books, drop a comment and let us know.
P.S. I guess it's time to get a Kindle since so many authors are going e-book only. Lulu.com is my publisher and they just announced that they will be putting my books in an e-book format. SWEET!!
We don't teach sales in school. Many companies have cut training budgets. However, sales is a process. If you want success, you develop and follow a system. From lead generation to qualifying the prospect to proposal to contract, there are a series of questions, actions, and follow up involved. Keith Rosen covers this in his book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Closing the Sale.
In his latest book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, Keith Rosen gives every business execute the playbook to coach the sales team to be champions. Great athletes have coaches. And sales professionals know it all anyway. (Just ask them!) So it is more about Coaching than it is about micro-managing, if the desired outcome is a productive sales force.
Buy it for less than twenty dollars today or tomorrow and receive a bunch of bonus material from sales champions like Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. Let me know what you think.
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