Conversations with Clients

There are other areas of the business that you can help a prospect. Having a conversation about network is easy. Too easy. Too comfortable.

Try something new.

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report was released this week. She makes 2 big points:

One: There are now about 3 billion global internet users, but user growth is stalling at about 9% year-on-year. Smartphone sales are slowing, as is the yearly growth in the number of smartphone users, down to 21% from 31% last year. There will still be a market for bandwidth, but the it will not be lucrative. Revenues need to diversify from network.

Two: The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images. There are now over 3 billion images shared daily between Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp–all but one of which are owned by Facebook. 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find products they want to buy. Messaging apps are moving from simple text tools to communicate with friends to platforms for commerce. It will make selling simple VoIP solutions difficult, because smartphone and apps beat a Hosted VoIP solution. This will make it even harder on the remaining VoIP Providers.

Other things not from Meeker’s report, but from the news.

Ransomware is a real problem for small and large businesses. Even NASA got hit – as did Congress recently. It is so bad, the FBI issued a warning. Selling security is going to be a big market. Data backup is a good solution for ransonware (if set-up properly). So is an anti-malware solution. How many businesses can afford to be down for 2 days?

Have you thought about selling data center? If they have an extensive WAN or MPLS network, a data center may be involved. QTS is turning the Sun Times building in Chicago into a large Tier 3 data center. It will have with 317K SF of capacity, 24MW of power and have fiber connectivity from 5 carriers. If you need help selling colocation, call the experts at COLOTRAQ.

If you want to stick with just bandwidth, how about managed WLAN or managed wi-fi solution for bigger buildings? Cablecos offer it. Some telcos. ADTRAN, Ruckus, Cisco. In a world of IOT and mobile devices, managing the wireless network is a pretty big problem to solve.

Don’t want to sell mobile devices? How about mobile expense management? Stay tuned for a podcast on Monday from Wireless Watchdogs.

Have you thought about Microsoft – and riding the wave of hype around Office365, Sharepoint and Skype4B? If you have read any of my blogs, I mention Skype4B often. There is demand for it.

WAN Monitoring is getting louder. Master Agents have added circuit monitoring. AireSpring offers it under the AireNMS service mark. Most VARs and MSPs offer RMM (remote monitoring and management) of desktops, laptops and servers. This is similar.

Colocation, Backup, Security, Monitoring, WLAN and mobile expense management are all items ancillary to what you are selling now. You would be doing a disservice to yourself and your customers by not mentioning them.

There will be a gulf of disapproval. (see diagram) I think that gulf is about 5 years old now. Time to get through the Dip, grab the bull by the horns and change.