Selling Telecom Blog

Need a Great IP Sales Person for Your BIG IP DEAL? Meet CPI's Diana Tedrow

Posted 6/30/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

CPI Communications based in Iowa recently joined TA as our newest "master agency" vendor member. My biggest job whenever TA gets a new master agent vendor member is to learn what they do differently or better than TA's other master agent vendor members and share that with TA's 3,800 members so they know when to pull CPI in on their next deal.

While CPI has a lot of things going for them, including great experience as to what it takes to field a profitable direct sales team, the most immediate value CPI offers to TA members, especially equipment VARs and computer systems integrators is Diana Tedrow, CPI's National Sales Director.

What's the big deal with Diana Tedrow? It's quite possible that she's the network service sales solution many equipment VARs and computer systems integrators are looking for before they commit to offering carrier services to their equipment customers.

Many master agents believe that equipment VARs are sitting on great customer bases that can easily be farmed for mountains of network service revenue. Why don't most VARs open up their bases for some lucrative carrier service farming?

Get the 411 on Easy "Information 411 Revenue" from Five Star

Posted 6/29/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

This one's easy.  Ask all your customers and prospects these two questions:

 

1. What do you spend each month on directory assistance information calls to 411 from your office phone?
2. How'd you like to cut that in half?

Listen to the interview I recorded with Five Star's President & CEO Roy Tanner below on how easy it is to pick up this revenue.

Tired of Competing Against Cable & Verizon Fiber? Sell it Through Bandwave Instead

Posted 6/29/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Don't you hate it when you get a great prospect or their IT partner on the phone after months of prospecting them and the first thing they say is they're getting their data and Internet from the local cable company or Verizon Fios/fiber and it "works just fine".  Or when you've pitched a nice 3.0 meg data pipe from your favorite CLEC and the prospect says, "Tell me again why this is better than the 10.0/2.0 meg connection I've got from my cable company that cost less than what you've proposed."

Man, I hate that! don't you?

Well we can hate it as much as we like but the sad truth is the "good old days" of making decent money from single location business customers in metro areas where the cable companies have strong business service footprints are long gone. What do we do now?

Ernest Asks, "Is Your Multi-Location Lunch Really Free?"

Posted 6/29/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

On a recent trip through Georgia I had the opportunity to stop by the Ernest Communications office to visit with my old friend Jeff Leshin the Sales VP and meet for the first time Paul Masters, Ernest's President & Co-Founder.  Ernest is a TA vendor that specializes in providing POTs, voice & data solutions for multi-location businesses.

As with all my visits to TA vendors I bring my video camera so they can speak to you directly without filtering from me.  Click the videos below to hear what both have to say to you, TA's telecom agent and channel partner vendors and see an additional video from Paul to see what he has to say directly to business end-user prospects that channel partners introduce Ernest to.

Is Nuvio the Best Hosted VoIP Provider in the Under $500/mo Segment? (Look Out, Cbeyond!)

Posted 6/22/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Nuvio Communications recently joined Telecom Association as a vendor member. Nuvio distributes SIP trunk service and hosted VoIP, the latter of which is offered through a unique, "IP-PBX like" pricing program and aims to dominate the market for business customers that spend under $500 a month for monthly phone service that many telecom agents, channel partners and equipment VARs have ceded to Cbeyond.

Nuvio's offering is a tonic to many agents that like to swap leads with small interconnects and IT consultants who typically have small customers that have phone bills under $300. For the past several years Cbeyond has spread like an unstoppable force through this market segment but now providers like Nuvox have the "Cbeyond alternative". 

Cbeyond's solution for this market has been to say, "Your phone bill, Internet bill, cell phone bill and 'managed services' are all over $500. We'll charge you just $495 and give you 'better service'". It's a decent enough pitch if you really want or need all the extras Cbeyond throws in and you don't have time to read the details of the iron-clad Cbeyond contract. 

While Cbeyond has the right to run their program any way they like, it's my personal opinion that ...

"My Experience Selling Energy" - One Agent's 6-Month Education Bucks Conventional Wisdom

Posted 6/22/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Telecom Association spends quite a bit of time distributing vendor information to our 3,800 members but we also spend as much time as we can soliciting and evaluating telecom agent and channel partner feedback. It's one thing for TA's vendor to say one thing or another about their service (and how easy or hard it is to sell) and quite another thing for TA's members to confirm that information.

So anyway, last week I had the chance to interview Marshall Lipscomb, President of TelogixSystems, a telecom agency located in Illinois about his experience selling gas and electric services to his end-user business clients and prospects. 

The bottom line for Marshall was that he found ...

5 Star Shows 4 Ways (A,B,C&G) 2 Earn With Energy Consulting

Posted 6/15/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Roy Tanner and his staff at Five Star Communications, a telecom master agent based in Florida, put on a great four hour presentation in Florida last week for over 20 agents who showed up to learn or expand their knowledge of selling and marketing competitive natural gas and electricity in deregulated markets. In addition to Roy, Joe Miller, Marketing VP of Interstate Gas Marketing Inc. was a key presenter.

Unlike other deregulated energy presentations I've seen, this one went into just the right amount of depth so that the audience really understood that Roy had "met the mark" of showing his audience, "this is how we're different". One left the presentation convinced that Five Star did have an exclusive arrangement with Interstate Gas and that natural gas is the right "carrot" to lead with when looking for the right energy prospect to spend time with. 

Three Main Take Aways

 The main "take aways" of the training were that ... 

Selling Energy Webinar 6/23 @ 2pm EST by WTG / Energent

 

Find out what it really takes to sell energy, A Phone+ Produced Webinar

Is selling electricity or natural gas right for you? Find out in this WTG/Energent sponsored webinar designed to answer that question and more. Join us for this FREE, live and interactive webinar.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 2:00 p.m. ET

Sponsor:

Moderator: Khali Henderson, editor in chief, PHONE+ 

The deregulated energy market opportunity is the buzz among telecom channel sales organizations. But is selling electricity or natural gas right for your telecom agency? Want to find out what it really takes to offer kilowatt hours and therms alongside T1s and PRIs and, more importantly, if it’s worth the effort? Join us for this timely discussion featuring longtime energy suppliers and telecom agents who already have added energy to their portfolios.

In this free Webinar sponsored by WTG/Energent, you will:

 

• identify geography and verticals where deregulation has created opportunities to resale electricity and natural gas and which are most promising.
• review the supply chain for electricity and natural gas.
• discover the differences/similarities between selling energy and telecom services.
• compare index/variable, fixed and hybrid product sets.
• learn what it takes – resources, relationships and skills -- to ramp up to sell energy.
• understand how sales agents and brokers are paid on electricity and natural gas sales.
• understand how to make your margin grow while delivering benefits to your client.
• hear in-the-trenches views from telecom agents who are selling energy.

Speakers: 

Vince Bradley, CEO, World Telecom Group/Energent

Fritz Kreiss, President, Alternative Utility Services

Louis Frate, CEO, Patriot Energy 

Brad James, Principal, James Communications

How To Get Systems Integrators to Sell Your Network Service? BUY THEM!

Posted 6/13/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

 
 ...Well that's a good way to do it!

I just finished a week trip through the Southeast states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina & North Carolina visiting Telecom Association vendor members to learn more about what they're doing in 2010. More than one TA vendor member wished there was some way to control the sales volume they got out of their partners. I guess PAETEC has figured out how to take control of sales volume from their systems integrator partners - buy them. Read PAETEC's press release here.

Click here to see the Quagga web page that states Quagga sells AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, XO & PAETEC. Think PAETEC's share of Quagga's network services volume is going to rise?

I think this acquisition is a quite clever as it sends the right signal to everyone in the marketplace - customers, carrier services partners and equipment partners - sell PAETEC network services with your equipment or we'll just sell the whole deal, network service plus equipment.

In my humble opinion, far too many carriers and carrier partners are far too...

Color Broadband: The One Carrier that Does it ALL in Los Angeles!

 
Posted 6/7/10 By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

I became a Color Broadband agent the hard way, after they kicked my ass in a competitive situation. I was offering a Los Angeles customer a Covad 8.0 meg fixed wireless solution and next thing you know Color Broadband was installing their service (and the customer was not returning my calls).

Like any good agent who loses a big deal I decided to find out ...