Downhill Sledding

For Agents especially, our business has been downhill sledding, much the way Calvin and Hobbes did it (see HERE).

Price compression on network, bandwidth and voice has become so bad that it prompted all of the consolidation. Cogent and HE certainly fuel the price erosion but agents selling the lowest price all the time on everything is only speeding it along.

Yesterday, I saw an ad for Broadview UC down to $17.95 per seat (lower if you have 75 seats or more). Folks, that is not a lot of money to do a lot of work.

There are over 2000 companies offering some version of Hosted VoIP/Hosted PBX or UC. There are companies selling it for less than $10 a line if that is what you want to do. Google it. You can find them. But 20 percent of $10 is not worth the cost of the time to sell it.

And all the calls you will get from the customer due to poor quality.

No one wants to walk away from an opportunity. Many provider vice presidents don’t know how to say NO to a crappy deal either, because they just want revenue — even crappy revenue.

I guess Windstream finally realizing that much of its small business revenue was unprofitable wasn’t enough of a wake up call for company execs and Agents.

Robotics and AI are coming. They will replace any transactional sales agent. Ordering on price: the customer could do that on Amazon — or on GeoQuote.

Agents have to re-think where they bring the value because like newspapers, taxi drivers, and a host of other jobs, AI is going to destroy it.

My slides from my talk yesterday at TelePacific, who will be announcing the new brand in Vegas at CP!

Tags: agents, bandwidth, commissions, price war, robotics
Related tags: downhill sledding, agents, price, revenue