One thing to think about: No one knows who you are so they buy from the Duopoly as a default. You are using direct mail to get sales, right? Kind of wrong. At first, it is a Branding exercise to get people to recognize that a third party offers telecom too.

The idea of the Bundle Offer – the Irrestible Offer — is to get people to respond! To start the sales process with you, to get in the funnel!

Start thinking about direct mail as a Red Apple from Red’s Apple Ale commercials – you want to knock them in the head; make them notice you, think of you, call you.

How to Craft an Offer That Can’t Be Refused

I thought I learned this lesson back in the early 2000-2002 time period, but my activity on Facebook this year would suggest that I have to re-learn it. This from Gary Vee:

“I don’t try to convert anyone. No one! None of the content, none of the things I do — books, keynotes, videos, T-shirts — are done in the hope they will convert a single person. I speak only to the already converted, and you should do the same…If you sell fax machines, and your market doesn’t believe in fax machines, don’t try to convince them to buy fax machines! Go find the people who have bought into the fax machine idea and sell to them.”

You can’t convert people. They have to buy into the idea themselves.

Cable had it easy. There delivery system (network) was already delivering TV content, the least profitable of the triple-play services. Telcos had to drop hundreds of millions to get into the telco TV game late. This article – Execs: AT&T, CenturyLink Re-Think Video Delivery Platforms, Strategies – comes as no surprise as PRISM is probably the last telco TV experiment to hit the market. U-Verse TV had 5.3 million subs before AT&T bought DirecTV.

VZ doesn’t even play this game any more. (They have about 5.5 Million FiOS TV subs and that number will decrease when Frontier takes over Cali next month and Texas and Florida in the future.) Verizon launched a skinny OTT Bundle, go90 service, bought AOL and now is doing a JV with Hearst Media for content/programming for Millennials – to increase mobile data consumption and ads!

The Telco TV segment has to be re-thought out because the dollars just are not there. Cable in some markets just gives away TV to get the broadband, the revenue and the subs – the metrics Wall Street watches. Cord cutting is still real. The giants are winning 0 Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Google. TV is just part of the ecosystem now.

AT&T is launching a Sling TV competitor with a skinny OTT video bundle.

From a post at Telecom Ramblings: “Lightpath continued to tack on more business from the education vertical this week. Yesterday the Cablevision subsidiary announced they will be implementing a 1,000-seat cloud-based voice system for Sarah Lawrence College, already a customer for raw bandwidth. The Westchester county-based institution had been trialing Lightpath’s hosted voice one in one department, and apparently liked what it saw — especially relative to the legacy phone system currently in place. With its fiber and Ethernet network already hooking up 7,000+ buildings in the metro area, selling voice into that customer base has been a source of growth.”

3 take aways:

One is if this cableco can provide 1000 seats to a college, then so can you. Cablevision has a Broadsoft.

Two, “selling voice into that customer base has been a source of growth” <– DUH! Sell Deep! Selling network is easy. Voice is a lot harder, which means it is stickier (if you do it right).

Three, you better get the voice because now that cablecos are selling it, they will be stickier than low price!!! Get in first.

Cablevision’s business division is called Lighpath. They are being acquired by Altice, yet are still executing on a strategy to take away double and triple play from the SME market.

From GapingVoid: “Why is business so hard? Simply put, we think it is due to a lack of humanity.” Hugh continues, “There is a coming tsunami of change around the recognition that the future of work is about culture, and the connections that we facilitate between people in our businesses.” Culture is coming back!

Additional quote, “Going as far back as 1999, our friend Tony Hsieh over at Zappos, really pushed this hard. He understood through observation that it is social capital that drives organizational effectiveness. He saw that people who had richer emotional connections, were more effective.” That is why I am looking to take the ZAPPOS tour in Vegas.

Trust is required for sales. “The obvious and rational equation is that being trustworthy plus being transparent will lead you to be trusted.” But The irrational thing about trust.

Short worthwhile read: Worth thinking about

What’s next in computing? Amazing that “The Raspberry Pi Zero is a 1 GHz Linux computer that you can buy for $5. For a similar price you can buy a wifi-enabled microcontroller that runs a version of Python.”

And lastly train your people: RAD-INFO WEBINARS