Selling Telecom Blog

Selling SIP & VoIP: Telesphere Sales VP Jeff Savage Talks to TA

The easiest way to learn to sell SIP, VoIP and other hosted business applications is to study under those sales people who are already paying their bills doing just that. To learn what we need to know I recently interviewed Jeff Savage, VP of Sales for Telesphere, an Arizona IP solutions provider that specializes in taking great care of multi-location business customers.

Jeff's a perfect sales trainer for agents because not only does he own Telesphere's agent channel, he owns their direct salespeople as well. He's got the pitch down. pay special attention to his answer to question four below at 11:00, "How are you better or different than your competitors?"

Great stuff! TA appreciates that Jeff and Telesphere are sharing some "secret sauce for selling IP.

How do your thoughts on the matter of selling hosted VoIP & SIP differ from Jeff's? don't forget to leave some comments below.

 

Click the player below to listen now or click here to download MP3 file recording of the interview.

(00:15) 1. What do we need to know about Jeff Savage? What chain of events led to you Telesphere and why are you there?

(2:27) 2. Our members are all pretty busy selling other solutions - but they don't want to be left behind if their customers would benefit from your solutions. Can you paint a picture of success in selling Telesphere? What sort of activity does it take to really succeed? How long is the usual sales cycle? What sort of activity do you expect from your direct reps?

(5:45) 3. So our members can visualize the sort of deals you excel at, can you please generically share a recent case study where a nice customer migrated to Telesphere? What were the pain points? Who were the competitors? What won the deal? And what did the provisioning process look like?

(11:00) 4. Like business customers, our members like to know how you're better or different from others. Our members are familiar with two other TA vendor Hosted VoIP providers, Smoothstone IP & Broadview Networks. How does Telesphere compare to these two? Same, better, different?

(14:20) 5. Finally we ask you to look into the "telecom crystal ball". We keep hearing that the mid-size, multi-location customer will be getting voice, data and applications from a single provider in the future. Do you agree with that? What other changes do we need to prepare for in the next 2 to 3 years?

(18:50) 6. Anything we forgot to talk about?

(19:30) 7. How should our members proceed if they'd like more information about becoming a Telesphere distributor?

Get more information about selling Telesphere as a telecom agent or channel partner:

Jeff Savage, VP Sales Telesphere - 480-385-7050 [email protected]

Skyler Stewart, Agent Manager Telesphere - 480-289-7577 [email protected]

Listen to Related TA Interviews:

Telesphere: Can They Beat Any CLEC, Hosted VoIP or SIP Competitor?  Clark Peterson, Telesphere CEO

Agent Testimonial for Telesphere's Hosted VoIP and SIP Solutions from Justin Bentley

Give TA your feedback. Leave comments below...                                       Approved?  Promoted?

Will Businesses Pay to "VoIP Call" on Smart Phones?

I received the following email today about how Toktumi has an iPhone app that lets users add a second line and talk airtime free over WiFi/3G. Click the image below to see the email solicitation.

 

My questions:

1. Are there any TA members who have business customers that are asking for this service?

2. If so, what vendors are you distributing and how do your customers like the service?

3. Are there any TA vendors offering this solution?

I have a Blackberry myself that gets pretty poor reception in my home office but I'm not sure I want to pay any sort of monthly fee to solve the problem because I'd rather talk on my desk set when I'm in the office anyway. 

As far as being able to talk without using airtime, I'm not sure that's a problem most business executives worry about?

Am I missing something? Post your thoughts below or email them to me at [email protected].

 

TMC Trains Agents on Hot Solutions for 2010

TA attended a very well received "Lunch-n-Learn" yesterday put on by TMC Communications. 

The training covered four of TMC's 2010 initiatives including: Hosted VoIP, Enterprise SIP, Bandwidth Management & Desktop solutions. We'll produce a video summary early next week of the event. See the video greeting below from TMC president Ron Ireland. 

 

 

Get more of TMC's cutting edge training at the Channel Partners show in Vegas March 1st at 4pm in the "Shell Seeker A/B" room. 

Learn more about TMC's agent program and training at www.TMCagent.com. 

Telesphere: Can They Beat Any CLEC, Hosted VoIP or SIP Competitor?

I interviewed Telesphere CEO  Clark Peterson this past week to discover why partners, customers and competitors are all interested in what Telesphere will do next. 

  What I learned is that Telesphere customers like the service so much they stay an average of eight years. Telesphere partners seem to be learning that they can get paid "four times more" than if they sell other services. 

  So what is Telesphere - CLEC, hosted VoIP or SIP provider? Yes! 

  Bottom line? If you sell local dial tone to multi-location customers you need to know about Telesphere (and try to avoid competing against them on your next deal.) Click the player below to listen now.

Interview Questions   Right-click here to download the MP3

     0.  (00m:15s) What do we need to know about Clark Peterson?

1. (02m:28s) Which end-user target markets are most attracted to your services?
2. (04m:05s) What type of channel partners are having the most success selling your services?
3. (07m:07s) Who are your primary competitors for both end-users and channel partners?
4. (11m:44s) How are your services better than your main competitors for both end users and channel partners?
5. (13m:06s) What is the geography of your marketplace? (On-net and off-net footprints?)
6. (15m:07s) Does your channel partner program have different commitment levels?
7. (17m:05s) Do you have retail or wholesale distribution channels that partners may find themselves competing against?
8. (18m:23s) Do you run retail pricing or agent commission promotions?
9. (18m:52s) Any significant program or product changes coming up in the future?
10. (23m:17s) Biography of company, owners, executives, agent support staff?
11. (25m:45s) "Crystal Ball" Questions

Please Post You Comment Below

Agent Testimonial for Telesphere's Hosted VoIP and SIP Solutions from Justin Bentley

Telesphere, a hosted VoIP/SIP/CLEC with a national footprint recently joined TA as a vendor member and part of our new vendor initiation includes asking, "Who loves you, baby?"  

The first agent testimonial we received for Telesphere is from Justin Bentley, National Sales Director for Telcom National, a master agency in Arizona.

Quotes in this audio include: "We found they're the best for the hosted VoIP product", "By 2011, we predict half our revenue will be from hosted VoIP", "The commissions are absolutely crazy!", "About half our customers could benefit from Telesphere-type solutions", "Nationally, Telesphere is our lead hosted VoIP and SIP provider" and "They're not inventing the solution - they're perfecting it!"

Click right-arrow below to listen now or download the MP3.

(00:12) First tell us about yourself. How long have you been in the industry?

(00:24) How long have you been a Telesphere partner?

(00:27) How does Telesphere's solution set fit into your agency's complete product set?

(01:01) What percentage of your revenues are from Telesphere-type solutions?

(01:40) Is Telesphere's service an add-on sale or do you lead with it?

(02:32) How does the service you get from Telesphere compare with other similar vendors?

(03:48) How do you see the Telesphere-type market changing over the next 2 years?

(05:18) What do TA's 3,500 members need to know about your company?

Contact Justin at 602-841-1000 or [email protected]. 

For more information about Telesphere please visit www.Telesphere.com. 

Selling Multi-Location Enterprise ("MLE") Accounts with Jay Morris

 

TA subject matter expert Jay Morris shares what it takes for TA members to "move upstream" to start selling large muliti-location business accounts. You can contact Jay at 404-918-4653 or [email protected]. Click the player below to listen now.

Interview Questions   Download the MP3 

 

   1. (00m:14s) Tell us what we need to know about your credentials and how you came to be a SME on multi-location accounts. 

2. (03m:22s) Please tease our audience about the multi-location opportunity. Without naming names and in general terms, can you tell us about a classic multi-location deal you've done? How'd you find the lead, how'd you get it proposed, how big was it and what kind of compensation did you realize.

3. (07m:30s) What are the characteristics of a great multi-location prospect? If we were to order up a big list of them from a list broker what would we ask for and why?

4. (11m:13s) What troubles are multi-location prospects trying to solve? If they were going to Google to try and find a solution to their problems what search phrase would they be typing into Google?

5. (13m:37s) I know you've both have experience selling for or against most the multi-location vendors out there so give us your experienced advice. Once an agent gets a nice multi-location prospect on the hook, how do they decide which multi-location vendor or vendors to shop them out to? Of the different vendors that say they specialize in multi-location deals, which program characteristics make the biggest difference to you when trying to choose which vendors to deal with?

6. (17m:38s) What are the opportunities and challenges faced by multi-location customers, agents and vendors over the next year or so?

7. (20m:03s) Anything else we've forgotten to discuss?                                                        Transcript

Agree or disagree? Post your comments below?

Well Here I Go Again!

I paid over $5,000 for TA's first website back in late 1996. It was published using Microsoft Frontpage. It seemed like a good deal back then to provide what I needed - a way to communicate with TA's growing number of members spread all over everywhere. Well FP was easier than anything else but it's never been easy - especially when I let my designer go ($60,000 per year salary) and started doing it myself.

Recently we've tried other web publishing platform mediums including WordPress, Joomla and Blogger. The first two were way too complicated and Blogger worked fine but the formatting (what your audience sees on the web) never looked very pretty.

So now I'm giving TypePad a try after reading a couple good reviews. I'll let you know what I think in a bit. Following is a sample video & audio since that's what we do a lot of around TA.

(This looks good!)

Granite_Marc_Metzger1

(The link above was supposed to be a visible audio player)