Poised to Outperform

In an article from Seeking Alpha (login required), the title just hit me – Here’s Why 8×8, Inc. Is Poised To Outperform. Then you read the article which pretty much quotes press releases and you realize that once again the financial writers know nothing about the tech and telecom space.

Is 8×8 poised to outperform the market? Let’s look.

8×8 signed up a couple of master agencies? Well, those masters have 20 other HPBX vendors, so it will be some hyper-competition to get the attention and awareness of the agents actually seeing customers (unless the masters are going to sell 8×8 directly).

A couple of hits in the mid-market and enterprise driven by indirect and national accounts sales. There should be some hits with all of the moves that were made in the organization to get these sales wins. Now, the task becomes, can they deploy it to the customer’s satisfaction and does the customer remain. (In the greater scheme of things, the sale is actually the easy part in cloud comm.)

BTW, a poor deployment or a disappointed customer will likely have an adverse effect on indirect channel sales as well as future Enterprise sales. (Enterprise sales = the golden goose of HPBX sales.)

Enterprise sales are nice; but you win the game with singles and doubles, not home runs.

The size of the Hosted PBX customer is growing. But the sweet spot is still 20-75 employees.

“8×8 appears well-positioned to capitalize on the increasing number of subscribed services per commercial customer. More importantly, the company continues to benefit from its strong pricing power in cloud-based SaaS markets, which should fuel sustainable monthly service revenue growth in the near future.” That’s a marketing pitch that screams buy the stock now while it is low!

Some of the big deals were OUTSIDE the US – in the UK. 8×8 lumps all of these sales together.

Infonentics rated 8×8 number one in hosted UC scorecard. West IP, Verizon and Comcast were all in the Top 4. Truthfully, awards don’t mean jack. They make nice press releases and they fool the masses, but unless the award giver looks under the hood, goes through the sales and deployment process, sees an implementation firsthand – what do they really know? It’s all about marketing and numbers. In this case, the metric is probably reported new seats sold.

The market is poised for Hosted PBX. The ocean is bigger, so all of the boats should be grabbing fish – all of them. IF they can get their sales teams aligned; customer acquisition costs under control; and deploy their systems to the customers in a satisfactory way.

Tags: 8×8, deployment, hosted pbx, marketing, UC
Related tags: enterprise sales, poised outperform, sales enterprise, press releases, sales, customer