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“Peter possesses a keen sense and insight for turning telecom services and products into customers and dollars. He is passionate about this industry, his work and the people he serves. Visit his site, read his blog and sign up for his newsletter at marketingideaguy.com and you will discover what makes Peter a sought after marketing consultant.”

Cynthia de Lorenzi, CEO, Patriot Computer Group
What's Up in Cellular Rumors?
On Rad's Radar
Thursday, 10 March 2011 12:32
sprint-logo-1sm.jpgFirst, Clearwire's founder and Chairman Craig McGraw resigned in February. Now CEO Bill Marrow has resigned and the rest of the C-Suite has been re-shuffled. (see story here).  Clearwire is in negotiations with Sprint and out looking for capital before it runs out of cash.

Lightsquared is also in talks with Sprint about a partnership on Lightsquares 4G network build.  MetroPCS thinks that Lightsquared would make a good partner too.

Leap Wireless is about to undergo a board shake up. Why? Too many missteps.  Leap Wireless is a great takeover target for CenturyLink.

Sprint is in talks with DT to merge with T-Mobile USA. The problems are the valuation of T-Mobile; the fact that DT has over $28B into T-Mobile USA; and how much ownership DT will have in the combined company. (FYI, Vodafone owns 45% of VZW).  Other issues are capital to build out the 4G network; integration (something that Sprint is horrible at); no iPhone; Clearwire in the mix; and Lightsquared at the edge.

The problem in cellular that is mainly a 2 horse race: Ma and Pa Bell. Everyone else is so far away as to be in a different race. Of course, Ma and Pa Bell are the only ones with a wireline division that helped fund and power the cellular company.

There are spectrum issues; radio and signalling caompatibility; and most importantly the integration issues. Interesting to watch.
Read more... [What's Up in Cellular Rumors?]
 
Citrix Cash Machine
On Rad's Radar
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 10:09
Citrix Splash Screen

Image by Irish Typepad via Flickr

I'm noticing a trend here.  Citrix made a deal with Cablevision to offer GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting at discounted prices to Optimum Voice and Optimum Online users. Then it was announced at EnterpriseCon that Skype was partnering with Citrix to offer conferencing to Skype business users.

A big BroadCloud component is conferencing (yeah, video is the highlight, but audio and web conferencing too).

Notice the trend? Conferencing!! Are you selling it to your customer base? Because if not, you, someone will get that commission.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Read more... [Citrix Cash Machine]
 
Thoughts on Deploying Cloud
On Rad's Radar
Monday, 07 March 2011 13:08

In this 13 minute interview with Dale Frohman of The Frohman Group , we discuss Cloud Deployment in the business.

Deployment of Cloud services is much easier in the small business space (under 100 employees), because typically this is not a complex network infrastructure. The first hurdle to Cloud Deployment is the complexity of the network environment.

Some systems just can not be moved to a cloud platform. Medium businesses (100-500 employees) may have legacy systems (like COBOL) that may take more work than is cost effective to shift to either IAAS or PAAS. Other application systems may be tied to other databases, which may mean moving one will require moving two or more applications or databases. It may be like pulling a string on a sweater.

Jim Meltzer of Ashton Metzler & Associates, says, "In order to successfully deploy Cloud-based services, Communications Service Providers need to develop a detailed business plan, a data center architecture and a management strategy."

Steven Taylor of Webtorials adds, "As we move toward cloud-based solutions, one of the most difficult tasks is defining how the network services that are used to access the cloud-based service and the cloud-based service itself interact. This is especially important and challenging in the definition of an appropriate Service Level Agreement."

Dale Frohman says the first question to ask is "Is it Critical or not?" Decide that before you ask "Can it go to the Cloud?" Your business SLA (service level agreement) may be more stringent than what the Cloud Provider will offer. That could prove disasterous.

I think most strategies will be Hybrid Cloud (like they are now), just because of network architectures, regulations, control issues and proprietary issues.

Speaking of issues, something that can fog up a Cloud deployment is Corporate Culture. As Frohman explains, as an MSP (managed service provider), he saw where employees who were unwilling to change had forces a company to move back to PC's from a Virtual Desktop rollout. Employees have to buy in to this Change in business. You can't gain on productivity when your workforce is blocking it. The future of the office environment will morph, but there are hurdles to how fast that it will happen in every business.
Read more... [Thoughts on Deploying Cloud]
 
VAR's in the Cloud with HyperOffice
On Rad's Radar
Monday, 07 March 2011 12:52
hyperoffice.gif

A podcast interview with Farzin Arsanjani, President of HyperOffice, discussing the opportunity for VAR's in the Cloud. HyperOffice is a SAAS provider that recently released a white paper that focuses on reseller opportunities in cloud messaging and collaboration, one of the fastest growing cloud markets. The largest opportunity for VAR's is to be the Trusted Advisor to businesses, who do not know what cloud provider to choose; whether or not cloud is for their business; and what a cloud deployment looks like (and how it will change their business process.
Read more... [VAR's in the Cloud with HyperOffice]
 
My EarthLink Strategy
On Rad's Radar
Friday, 04 March 2011 04:38
earthlink

When I analyze the four CLEC components of the new EarthLink Business, I wonder what Atlanta will do with it.

Deltacom had a huge fiber network (IFN) that essentially went under-utilized. In my experience, many employees did not know about IFN. Assets like lit buildings, collocations, colo gear, and the fiber maps are crucial to revenue generation from those hard cost assets.

Essentially, Deltacom was competing on price in the T1 space. It's two core products - Metro-E off IFN and the MVNO - were not marketed well. It's Channel strategy was bipolar - first terminating agents, then out courting them.

Admittedly, I did not have much experience with ONE Communications. Based in the Northeast, it was a regional CLEC that did not have a strong brand; a market differentiator (like Deltacom's MVNO); or a powerful sales force. After the integration of CTC,  Choice One, and Conversant, it was touting almost a billion in revenue, 700 collocations, etc. The purchase price of $370M including paying off the $285M of debt means that $800M in revenue sold for $85M. 160,000 business customers went for $85M, which is an acquisition cost of about $531 each.

When ONE talks about 10,000 miles of IOF fiber, it is talking about inter-office fiber between collocations ordered via a favorable inter-connect agreement with the ILEC. Although this IOF does mean that there is a solid network connecting the 700 colos.

STS Telecom was once a large UNE-P shop. Now it is a Broadsoft based VoIP Provider. This purchase by EarthLink was the quietest. STS is supposed to provide $15M in revenue to ELNK this year. It makes me wonder what the New Edge AX partners like Simple Signal do. STS telecom does provide ELNK with an experienced Hosted PBX team. That is certainly something that can be leveraged across the merged entity.

New Edge Networks does an adequate job of sticking to its knitting of DSL. It was shadowed in the last year by the Megapath deal. In fact, it has been all Megapath news that I have seen in this CLEC sector. NEN seems to be missing the boat on G.SHDSL. For a company that relies on its copper plant access, it seems to be missing the boat on Mid-Band Ethernet as a means to jump the T1 chasm and compete in the business bandwidth war.

New Edge has a good channel strategy with no channel conflict.

Launching the AX platform was a great positioning move. Following the idea of the smartphone apps stores, the AX was a chance for cloud partners to offer services on the New Edge Network in a "private cloud". Much different than the public cloud approach of so many today. It needs to add a number of partners in the data backup/storage space, merchant credit card processing, POS and business applications. I don't mean a connection to Salesforce, but more like practice management software, point-of-sale software, and other applications that are business process requirements for companies.

New Edge has a strong retail presence, showcasing itself as a PCI Compliance expert. It could take this a step further. Taking Skype's idea of partnering with Citrix for conferencing, NEN should partner with Citrix for POS software. Then when the bundle includes POS, merchant card processing, a SIP trunk and video surveillance over the MPLS network, agents can offer a turn-key solution for the retail sector that New Edge Networks already chases.


This integration of 4 CLEC's will be about how well the final entity, EarthLink Business, can leverage its assets: current customers; fiber network; collocation footprint; and channel partners. The back office system integration is another story and will certainly make the rest of this year uncomfortable in many areas: ordering, billing, provisioning, and commissions - while all of it moves to one system.

The future of EarthLink Business depends on whether they come to market with the same old products that ONE and Deltacom struggled to sell or if it develops new product offerings and bundles that will stand out from the CLEC competition. Brand Relevance is the key to the future. PAETEC attempts this with energy and MSP plays. With PAETEC, XO, Megapath, AireSpring, Windstream Business, Broadvox, Level3 and more all clamoring for business, EarthLink needs some unique ideas.

Deltacom hasn't marketed its MVNO play. Moreover, it is a move that Cbeyond was first to market with; now Tele-Pacific is also selling. Yet, it is a start in the business bundle program. The question becomes What next?

Like Cloud, Unified Communications, and Convergence, the CLEC space is filled with me-too offerings. Not just the resellers either. Even the facilities based CLEC's offer the same boring products that they have for years. Calling it a Dynamic T1 or IP-Flex doesn't make it sparkle. At the end of the day it is a T1. And we are near the death of the T1. To the business owner cable broadband speeds are faster and cheaper than T1. Is a T1 even adequate for a business that is moving deeper into cloud apps? And how significant is Internet Access to a business today?

Thousands of collocations when you count Deltacom, New Edge and ONE. That's a large copper footprint for Mid-Band Ethernet to reach a large footprint of businesses (prospects). But what is the Value Proposition?

After spending two days at Enterprise Connect where everyone was shouting UC, Cloud and Collaboration without being able to define it, clarify it or make it concrete in any way, I feel that too often in our industry we forget that we need to stand out - like a Kindle or a Prius - and have a tangible benefit and value to our intended target market. Another example, if your press release is titled Enterprise offering, then you should not be talking about businesses with less than 250 employees. It's confusing.

This is a perfect opportunity for EarthLink as most of the big boys are also integrating acquisition (Windstream, Qwest-CenturyLink, Paetec). It's a chance to be loud and stand out. (By the way, I would love to help you figure it out. I have plenty of ideas how to go-to-market; on bundles; on channel; and on sales strategy. Call my office at 813-963-5884).
Read more... [My EarthLink Strategy]
 
Big Q: How Do I ...
On Rad's Radar
Wednesday, 02 March 2011 04:35
So a big question I get from service providers is How Do I Sell Online? This question comes in many forms, such as (1) How Can I Sell This on my Website?; (2) How Can I be like RingCentral?; (3) How do I sell more on the web?; (4) What's that SEO thing?

Let's tackle the SEO thing first. (You can hear Rich Tehrani and I talk about SEO here).  Search engine optimization is about helping your website show up during one of the 31B searches done every month. But really SEO is about determining your best target audience and how they search for you and optimizing your online presence (website, blog, presss releases, etc.) to capture THAT keyword on page 1. There's a some marketing that needs to go into this. It's not all black magic.

First of all, you have to know your target market. Then you have to figure out what keyword or key words they would use while searching Google for your product or services. Considering the garbage pail names and vague press releases in our industry, just doing these first two steps will put you ahead of the game.  (Just becuase everyone is saying Cloud Comm, doesn't mean you have to also. And if you do: how about defining it in your marketing!)

So you have a target and your key words, now you want to create content around that. Blogs, press release, and working with TMC.

Next, let's look at your website.  What is it designed for? Who does it talk to? What is it saying?

If you want a website that sells your services, you have to design it for that. Online brochures, pretty flash objects, and all the bells and whistles don't help sell stuff. Don't believe me? Look at Amazon or Buy.com as an example of site designed to sell.

All marketing is marketing. Meaning you have to use the basics: call to action, an offer, a headline, a slogan or elevator pitch, clear language, create interest, etc.  Just because it is online instead of offline doesn't mean that marketing is different.

I think it's funny that companies want more ROI and metrics for online but have been buying yellow page ads, billboards, print ads, radio and TV commercials for years without any real measurement. But all the sudden you need REAL metrics.

Yesterday, one marketing director was talking about how he had to design a system to take leads from his online marketing sites; his webinars; and his conference booths to track them and show ROI. I understand why this is important. But think about all the business cards that have been collected in the last three years that were never tracked.

Page views and biz cards are not the metric. They are A metric - a place to start.  You need page views and biz cards to get your message out. Then you need the prospects to take an action, ask questions, etc. You also need the info so your sales team can do its thing - qualify prospect and needs analysis.

Back to the website sales. You need traffic to your website. This can come from a variety of tactics: a PPC (pay-per-click like Google Adwords) campaign; SEO; email marketing; twitter; LinkedIn (but not Facebook since those folks don't like to leave their AOL-like island).

Next is the Landing page. You can have a landing page for each campaign. You can have more than one to segment and test your landing page. But that landing page has about 8 seconds to grab the visitor's attention and tell them a story that they want to hear.

After the story, you want to give them an offer and call them into action. Somehow you want to capture their contact info so that you can put them in your funnel for sales follow up, unless your website is designed to close them, which most are not.

The art of the website close is ease of use. If there is a hurdle or a jump off point or something loads slow or it something looks untrustworthy, they are gone. Ask web marketers about bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment rates.

So there are a lot of components that go into selling online. Maybe a little more than goes into selling IRL (in real life, offline). Face-to-face can build trust easier than a website. The basics of marketing are about the same. The thing is: online metrics are better than offline, so you find out fast how bad your offer is, your slogan is, your website is, your content is, your sales system is. Be Prepared for that.

Today, if you design an email marketing piece or a direct mail piece, your response rate is less than 1%  (a Facebook ad is less than 1/10th of 1%). You expect that. No imagine that you get 2000 unique visitors in a month (a good number in our industry, btw) and only 1% respond. That's still better than the direct response, but somehow it just upsets marketers.

Just some stuff to thing about.
Read more... [Big Q: How Do I ...]
 
Why Do I Have To Give You That Info Again?
On Rad's Radar
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 06:10
Speaking with Fonolo CEO Shai Berger and I were talking last night about Call Centers and the lousy customer satisfaction. All the M&A activity creates pockets of technology and data and apps that cannot integrate easily with other pockets of apps, systems, data.

For example, a customer calls an 800 number of a company that bought two companies - and integration is complete. Except it isn't. The company uses a couple of call centers to fulfill customer service. Maybe one call center in Iowa on Genesis handling Product A; another in Chaicago on InIn handling Product B. These systems do not inter-operate. So the customer has to input his account number or other info more than once. Very frustrating.

Berger mentioned that zero out rates are between 30 to 50%! And companies spend lots of time and money on IVR systems, menus, choices. to no avail.  Worse, he continued, is that customers then spend time venting at the CSR's, which translates into even more money burned up.

Call center jobs have already increased about ten thousand this year, as more business moves to the web. Probably the bankruptcies of brick-and-mortar stores like Borders/Waldenbooks and Blockbuster will ultimately result in less retail jobs, but more customer service jobs - at a call center.

It's an interesting case, as VoIP companies want to have zero touch installs, etc. However, they will need to ramp up call centers to handle the instances when that fails and other ancillary issues, like PC support that ISP's ultimately ended up handling.

VoIP companies likely won't have the same silo issue that telcos have, where the call center is a separate business from the marketing department, who ultimately owns customer satisfaction metrics. The call center people care about metrics - call times, zero outs, etc. - but those are just numbers. The bottom line is that the call center is not incented for customer satisfaction. (As I blogged yesterday, Retention is key as product pies flatten or shrink because customer acquisition costs rise.)

Fonolo's answer to the call center frustration is to offer an over-the-top IVR that will help increase customer satisfaction. It will also put some of the IVR power back in the marketers hands as opposed to the call center ops team.
Read more... [Why Do I Have To Give You That Info Again?]
 
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