Telecom Association attends multiple expos, trade shows and meet-n-greets throughout the year where vendors and agents get together to learn from one another. This blogs shares with TA members what TA experinces at these shows.
Telarus hosts their annual agent expo each year in Las Vegas during the two days that precede the annual Channel Partners Conference. It's a training intensive event that brings Telarus' corporate staff together with close to 100 of their top agents and most all of their top vendors.
The first of the two days was dedicated to deep technical training with Qwest on their SIP, MPLS and hosted VoIP solutions. the day was capped off by a great case study that required that the audience put their thinking caps on to solve a problem for a multi-location customer.
Scroll below to get a flavor of the great training day.
At the Channel Partners Conference today Telarus unveiled "CarrierQuoteShop.com", their new website for offering instant multi-carrier quotes to any agent - even agents that are not Telarus agents. The new site is powered by the patented GeoQuote software platform that Telarus built in-house to create instant multi-carrier quotes for their own agents.
To hear why Telarus is doing this, click the player below to listen to an audio interview with Telarus president Adam Edwards. Click here to download the MP3 file of the interview.
By creating a resource where any agent can get quotes, Telarus appears to be addressing two issues. First and formost, they are creating a tool that conceivably any or all agents will want access to which will then motivate the carriers to invest whatever resources are neccesarry to keep the information that generated the quotes current.
The second issue Telarus seems to be addressing is to prove to the telecom industry that their patented multi-carrier quote software is indeed the best solution on the market. Before Carrier Quote Shop, only Telarus agents knew and understood the capabilities that GeoQuote brought to the table. Now any agents can experience it without needing to be a Telarus agent.
Why give it away to agents who aren;t Telarus agents?
They obviously want to be THE QUOTING ENGINE. The telecom carriers are not going to want to support every different quoting service with all their data. They are just going to want to do one. To date, Master Stream was making the case that THEY were the single quoting solution the carriers need to feed. With their actions today, Telarus seems to be saying, "Not so fast - before you all get into that 'row boat' check out this high-performance 'speed boat'"!
Will it work? Will Telarus position themselves as THE quoting engine? I can't say for sure but speaking as an agent I do know I've snuck onto GeoQuote myself in the past to see if the quote I was taking a customers was indeed the best quote that could be found. If they end up being perceived as "the Google" for multi-carrier quotes then they may just win.
But what are your thoughts? Please post your comments below.
To get more of a background on the whole quoting evolution, please listen to the past interview on where history of the multi-carrier quote.
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