My TA News

Hosted VoIP vs. IP-PBX RFP for 23 Seat CPA Needs Hosted VoIP Proposals: Can You Compete and Win?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email

As many of you know, in addition to running Telecom Association I'm also an active agent and telecom consultant. (You can view my agent consultant website at www.BaldwinTel.com.)

About a month ago I secured a non-commissioned consulting client that wanted me to help them sort through seven premises based IP-PBX phone system proposals they had received to replace their 14-year old Executone business phone system.  

Over the past month I've reviewed their existing proposals and interviewed them about what they were trying to get from their new phone system.

 

What They Have & What They Want

Their business is not all that complicated - they're a CPA/accounting firm with just one location that needs 22 phones replaced.  Two of their owners like to work remotely from a home office and they'd like to have the option of having more employees work from home.

What they like most about their current Executone phone system is their ability to "park" a call and then "all page" to get another person to pick up the phone.

What they like least about their Executone is that it's old and they don't want to buy any more old replacement parts for a 14-year old phone system.

Their voice and data network services are currently being provided by TelePacific - eight SmartVoice analogue voice lines provisioned as part of a 4.0 meg EoC ("Ethernet over Copper") circuit. TelePacific has advised the client that they can convert the 8 analogue lines to either SIP or PRI for a one-time charge of $200. Their TelePacific agreement expires in January 2013.

While they don't have a burning need for all the new VoIP phone features they hear about, they certainly want to be able to take advantage of them as they learn how to use them.

 

Which IP-PBX Business Phone Systems They're Considering

Following are the IP-PBX proposals they have on hand or are waiting for:

1. Avaya IP Office
2. Mitel 5000
3. Samsung OfficeServ 7200
4. Star2Star Starbox 2200
5. NEC SV8100
6. Vertical MBX, and
7. 3CX (the dealer dropped out - we need a new 3CX dealer)
8. Allworx
9. BandTel SIPTrex

While they certainly seem to want to buy another premises based system (since they got 14 years of life out of their Executone),  I told them that they really should look at a couple hosted VoIP solutions. While they had not been approached by any hosted VoIP dealers, they said they were certainly interested in knowing if hosted VoIP was a better deal over the IP-PBX proposals they have.

 

Can You Propose a Hosted VoIP Solution that Beats IP-PBX?

Since the customer's paying me directly to help them evaluate prospective vendors I can't represent any hosted VoIP solutions myself but I can invite hosted VoIP solution partners or vendors to review the RFP ("request for proposal") I've created and bid directly themselves if they seem to be a decent fit for the client.

Following are the hosted VoIP vendors that are considering the RFP:

1. RealLinx
2. Cloud Connect

I'd like to include the following hosted VoIP vendors if I can find an agent or partner to do the RFP:

1. Broadview
2. Megapath/Speakeasy
3. Telesphere
4. SimpleSignal
5. 8x8

If you're an experienced agent partner of Broadview, MegaPath/Speakeasy, Telesphere, SimpleSignal or 8x8, or you're an experienced partner of another hosted VoIP solution provider that is well matched to the SMB/small business marketplace and would like to take a look at the RFP and perhaps submit, please send me an email to Dan@BaldwinTel.com.

The RFP is reasonably simple and should not take you more than 60 minutes to complete.  Let me know if you're interested. I need all RFPs complete by July 13th. 

DONE FOR YOU MARKETING: Help Your Small Customers find the Right Unified Communications Vendor

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email 

Unified Communications or "UC" is usually thought of as an integrated business communications solution that only large businesses can afford.

Click here to view a blog post at BusinessPhoneNews.com you can share with your small customers to show them how you're an expert at helping them choose a UC vendor that tailors solutions for the under 100 phone set.

The post is also reprinted below.

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I've been helping small and medium sized business customers choose business phone equipment and business phone services for over twenty years and I've never once had a customer or prospect with a office phone system problem call and ask me for a

Chicago Confidential: Last Day - Which "Cloud" Business Phone System Pitch Sells Best & What Happens Next?

Posted 8/26/11 By Dan Baldwin
TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155

The promise of learning the best way to sell Alteva's unified communications business VoIP phone system "in-the-cloud" is what got me out of my office this week and to the semi-annual Channel Partners trade show hosted this Fall in Chicago.

I sat through two days of Alteva's Sales Certification program for one reason, to learn the best "cloud services" business phone system pitch so I could get busy selling more "cloud solutions" to all my customers that are supposedly just waiting to hear the right sales pitch to "buy some cloud" which will no doubt solve all their IT headaches.

While I'm sure we can all agree that the best VoIP/SIP/Cloud business phone system and related applications will be determined by more than just an "elevator pitch" - the biggest customer sale starts with an elevator pitch.

 

Who's Got the Best Business VoIP Phone System "Elevator Pitch"

So to make the best time of the last day of the trade show I went booth to booth recording every VoIP business phone system pitch I could find in order to hear (and them learn) the best one.

The following TA vendor members that provide business VoIP or "cloud" phone services are presented in alphabetic order.

Which one do you think is best?  Please leave a comment below. 

 

AireSpring

Ron McNab of AireSpring

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Alteva

Peter Caperonis of Alteva

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GLOBALINX

Michael Machonkin of GLOBALINX

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MegaPath

Ross Anderson of MegaPath

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Simple Signal

Dave Gilbert of SimpleSignal

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TouchTone

Steve Kaplan of TouchTone

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Vocal IP

Josh Redick of Vocal IP

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Other Services Complimentary to Hosted VoIP 

AireSpring's MPLS Mesh Service

Ron McNab of AireSpring

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Ben Bronston, Telecom Lawyer

Ben Bronston, Telecom Lawyer

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Granite

Charlie Pagliazzo of Granite Telecom

 

What Happens Next? 

As telecom agents and channel partners it's our job to "learn the pitches" and sell the heck out of this stuff.

While certainly most telecom customers are going to want to dig all the way down to the nitty gritty (with your help) to find the best service providers for their unique position in the market, it's our job as professional independent sales advisers to help our customers understand which three vendors they start their conversations with.

That's where a good "elevator pitch" comes in.

So pick your favorite couple hosted VoIP and unified communications providers, learn their pitch, sell their stuff - and then tell me all about it at the next Channel Partners trade show in Vegas!

WTG & Vendor Sponsors Fete Top Agents in Malibu at Annual "Tee & Sea" Event

Posted 5/11/11 By Dan Baldwin, Editor  951-251-5155 email 

Vince Bradley, his WTG staff and their vendor sponsors welcome the top telecom agents, IT consultants and business phone system equipment VARs from Los Angeles, California and throughout the nation this Thursday and Friday at WTG's 9th annual "Tee & Sea" Event.

The annual event kicks off this year with a lunch at the end of the Malibu Pier followed by brief presentations from the event's premier sponsors Time Warner Cable Business Class, Level(3), Earthlink Business, MegaPath, XO Communications, BCE Nexxia and Integra Telecom.

Thursday ends with a hapy hour reception on the pier and then with private agents dinners hosted by WTG's premier sponsors.

Friday's events include golfing or wine tasting followed by arcade games, raffle prizes, a 19th hole happy hour and then an awards banquet. 

Event sponsors migling with WTG's top agents on Friday include telx, GreenAppX, TelePacific, NetWolves, Internap, AboveNet, ACC Business, PAETEC, SimpleSignal and Ernest Communications.

Lessons for Telecom Agents and VARs from the UC Summit in La Jolla, California

By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, Posted 3/28/11

I'm at the UC Summit spending a couple days rubbing shoulders with the "Big Iron" vendors (NEC, Avaya, Siemens, etc.) who specialize in migrating their Fortune 1000 customers from old TDM solutions to the new world of "Unified Communications".  I attended this event last year as well.

The invited attendees are the consultants and systems integrators who call on the mid-market and enterprise customers who most all need every solution under the sun for different call centers.  Next to no agents here but there are many interconnects, the NEC vendors and the like who network services agents often try to network with.

Smart people I know who are here include Dave Gilbert of SimpleSignal and Steve Handelman of ATEL Communications. Everyone here has something in common with networks services agents and vendors though in that we're all looking to figure out how to live off of being the vendor that "sells the business application" that makes the customer's  business process work.

All of us whether we're living off selling network service or equipment solutions now, are all trying to be the first and favorite "cloud applications" provider for our best customers next year.

Following are the highlights of what I've learned so far:

ADVODA "Agent of the Year" for SIP/Hosted VoIP Provider SimpleSignal

By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, Posted 3/12/11

I met Ron Dunworth and Hilary Fox of ADVODA back in June 2009 on a trip to Colorado when they invited me to tour their office. I met them again later that year when they invited me to come to Denver and cover their 2nd Annual "Agent Day". (Click here to see a video review.) 

The two things that impressed me about ADVODA back in 2009 was the scope of their office operations (they had about 20 people all furiously managing mid-level to enterprise customers) and they had a real focus about finding the right SIP/hosted VoIP partner for their larger customers.

I remember back in 2009 Ron thought he'd found the perfect hosted VoIP partner and had even introduced the VoIP partner to a couple resellers he was working with.

I caught up with Ron again six months ago at the Washington DC Channel Partners show at the the SimpleSignal "Koolaid Party" and learned that

Marketing: Getting Your Video & Audio on Your Smart Phone, Blog & the Web

By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Many products are now on the market that make it just as simple as possible to get video into your marketing properties like your website, blog, email & social media pages. Recently I found one that's helped me get video off the web entirely and onto my smartphone (a Blackberry Storm) but I'm sure it would work for an iPhone or iPad as well.

What's the point? Video sells things better than words. Below is  a video that one of Dave Gilbert's employees made recently to help explain how Simple Signal's unified communications tools and hosted applications make any business phone system work better.

It's great when you're talking to a sales prospect and they can watch your video on your blog but what about when you're at a business lunch or meeting in the hall?  Show the video on your smartphone. By putting the video on your phone you can show it whenever you need to without the need for Internet access.

Below the video is a list of the various tools I'm using as a telecom agent and channel partner to get video on the web and my smartphone.

 

Sample Video Edited on Camtasia & Hosted by ScreenCast
click here to download to play it on your smartphone

 

Magic DVD Ripper - For $35 you can rip video from a DVD directly to the M4V format which is what most smartphones need. The nice thing about the M4V format is that it can also be played in most web video players like Windows Media Player. (MP4 is the current standard video format for YouTube & such but regular Mp4 videos won't play on most smartphones).

 

AVS Video Editor - For $55 this software lets you convert video from any format to almost any other format. This is useful if you've got old WMV, AVI or FLV video you need to convert to M4v.

 

ScreenCast - This is where you should host all your video in addition to YouTube.  (YouTube is good for search but many people can't watch any YouTube hosted video while at work due to their company's firewall restrictions.)  ScreenCast is only $10 a month, doesn't compress your your video like YouTube, allows for download of the original video file & provides very clean, ad free embed code so you can play the video from any site.  The video above is hosted on ScreenCast.

 

Camtasia - Possibly the only video editing software you'll ever need at just $300. I added the green lettering and the end credit to the above video using Camtasia. Video editing software is primarily neded to resize the video frame so it's the right size for whatever web page it will play from. The software also compresses or makes the original video file small enough to "stream" off the web (start playing instantly) instead of making the viewed download a large video file before it will play.

 

Windows Movie Maker - If you're not ready to buy Camtasia then Microsoft's free Windows Movie Maker ("WMM") software is your next best choice.  WMM comes free with every computer on the planet that uses the Windows operating system. To find it on your computer click "Start,  All Programs, Windows Movie Maker". Even though (I think) it only produces video in Microsoft's proprietary WMV format, this format is pretty universal in that almost all computers can view it with Windows Media Player.  

WMM is also convenient for turning audio recordings into a "video" you can upload to YouTube or Facebook. (At church I help my pastor record his sermons to a WMA audio file using a Olympus WS-400S I bought on sale for $50 at Radio Shack.  I drop the audio into WMM, pull in a photo to add the "visual part" and then save it as a video that I can then upload directly to YouTube or Facebook.)

Below is a sample video I made for my church using WMM and the voice recorder that I uploaded to Facebook & YouTube. Anytime any of your people do an important business lecture you can easily & quickly publish it just as easily.

 

Sample Video Created from an Audio File

Audacity Sound Editor - If you're trying to record a phone interview connect your headset to your computer and use audacity to create your audio file and then edit it.  If you can't get your existing headset/amplifier to do the trick, try the Plantronics MX-10 which is what I use.

 

PodSnack - If you can figure out how to get a MP3 or some other audio recording from your phone and you don't care about turning it into a video so you can publish to Facebook or YouTube, use PodSnack to generate a simple audio player with the needed "embed code" to then play it on your blog. Below is the same audio sermon from my church above "burned" to a simple audio player. (I had to convert the WMA file to MP3 using the Windows Audio Converter that comes with Windows Media Player because PodSnack only accepts MP3.)

 

 

Questions? Call 951-251-5155 or email 

SimpleSignal - News Template Title, Body and Footer

News Template: Title 

1.  Title - In the title above please make the first word the main vendor or service category name that this news story is about followed by a colon followed by a competting title.

For example:

AireSpring: New February Promotions Announced topping $1,000 per order

or 

Video Conferencing: A+ Rolls Out Affordable, High-Quality Desk-Top Conferencing

Leading with the main category makes it easier for readers of TA's Daily Digest Email Newsletter to quickly scan all headlines and then click on the ones that are important to them. The Daily Digest comes ouot the day following the news post. If you want to go back and change your archived news post headline after the Daily Digest has gone out, that's fine.

 

News Template: Body

2. Opening Summary - The first 400 characters (not words) of the body will appear in the Daily Digest Email Newsletter so you want it to lead with keywords, action verbs and whatever is compelling to agents about your news so they will feel compelled to "click here to read whole article".  Feel free to include hyperlinks in the opening summary of they add value.

3. Images - If you have images within the first 400 characters they will appear in the Daily Digest Email (which is good) because that will draw the readers eye to your news. I good size for these images is about 120 x90 pixels. After the first 400 characters images can be no wider than 565 pixels.

4. Font Defaults - When you create a news story from scratch in our portal, when you click "preview" you'll see the default post font is 12 point Arial with one and a half line spacing. 

5. Using Your Own HTML - Feel free to use your own HTML by simply pasting it into the HTML window. This is the ony way to get tables in.

6. Width Limit is 570 Pixels - Anything wider won't appear when viewers view your post atwww.myTAnews.com. 

7. Audio & Video - Feel free to use embed code below the first 400 characters.

8. Vendor Footer - Cut & past in the vendor footer we've created for you that you can see below.

9. Category Choice - In the category window in the right column please choose your vendor name along with any services and/or metros clearly mentioned in the news article.  Please don't "category spam" by over clicking categories that are not the main topic of your news post.  It's better to do a separate news post for different categories you want to cover as we are getting our audience to "category subscribe".  When "category searchers" come across your news it needs to be about that category.  TA is open to adding categories if it seems appropriate. Let us know what you need.

10. Keyword Choice - Where as categories are predefined, keywords are up to you. Whatever Internet searchers are searching for (where your business is the answer) should be your keywords. don't use keywords though unless the keywords are actually in your news post in a meaningful way.

11. Edit Your Permalink - The "permalink" for your post appears under the title bar and is automatically generated. Before you do your final publish you should edit the permalink and put in as many keywords from you news post as is appropriate. This will drive more web search to your post.

12. Promote Your News Link to Your Own Social Media Audiences - Shorten your permalink atbit.ly and then Tweet it out on Twitter and then post it to your LinkedIn account and Facebook page as news.

13. Promote Your News Link - Let everyone know they can read all your news at myTAnews.com/(vendorname). Feel free to post this link on your own website.

11. Need Help? - Contact Kathleen Brown at 951-296-3870 or Dan Baldwin at 951-251-5155.

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About SimpleSignal

SimpleSignal is looking for qualified technology professionals to partner with us to take advantage of what we believe is the beginning of the biggest transformation in communications history. Businesses of all sizes are making the switch to IP telephony and SimpleSignal is positioned perfectly to be on the leading edge of this transition through our amazing hosted applications, or Software as a Service (SaaS) layered on our ultra-reliable, flexible, hosted PBX solution.

It took a while for businesses to realize they could really trust IP communication, but now that it’s becoming obvious that this is not an issue, the cat is out of the bag! Won’t you join us as we change the world through this disruptive technology? Our employees are ready. Our technology is ready. The market is ready. Are you ready?

SimpleSignal’s Partner Programs are the lifeblood of our success. Therefore we take our Partner relationships very seriously and invest heavily in your success. We commit to you the most generous compensation plan, professional technical and sales support, training and much more. There are no financial commitments or quotas required but we do ask that you take your business seriously and we have the product it takes to succeed.

Join the emerging leader in IP communications and hosted applications through either our Affiliate or Reseller Partner Program. You’ll be glad you did!

For more information, contact Dave Gilbert, CEO, at 949-429-4758, dave@simplesignal.com, or visit SimpleSignal’s corporate or partner website, LinkedIn, Flickr, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Blog Posts, or TA Index Page.  SimpleSignal’s Email News: view, subscribe.