There is this discussion about softswitches going on (again) on Voiceops. Someone has a laundry list of features and conditions and doesn’t want to pay per seat licensing. The discussion sidetracked into the viability of open source. There is overhead on open source too.

We had a great discussion about open source in a service provider’s world at ITEXPO in 2 panels with Dialogic, XO and Netsapiens (see summary here). We are doing it again at ITEXPO in Ft Lauderdale in January. Join in.

On all discussions about softswitches, VoIP providers kind of skip the step of WHAT IS IT FOR? The switch is just a tool, right? If you boil it down anyway. It is the techie fun part, but it is irrelevant to the customer. The Customer just wants dial-tone and the service as you promised. Period.

Now you can back that up and say that the Customer just wants a cheaper replacement than POTS/PRI, which explains the 2 million plus SIP trunks that Windstream and XO have on BSFT, but it has more to do with the way we sell and how the industry has been. Since the dawn of the TA96, this industry has been about arbitrage – same service for less – all the way from dollars per minute to less than pennies per minute.

Education is still a huge component of the Cloud Comm sales process. You have to extol your value against the other 2000+ Hosted VoIP providers, the cable guys, the PBX vendors, Miscorsoft and Cisco – and the guy down the street running an Asterisk box. If you can’t (or won’t) do that, then just sell dial-tone replacement and shut up already. Seriously. It isn’t easy — and we are lazy.

CLECs are pissed because they had Integrated T1 and were printing money with that (and with UNE-P) and pissed both opportunities away. Get over it!

Today, you have to bundle better, tell a better story, align with your market and educate them that you are the expert – or you are screwed. Period.

Pick a softswitch that matches your market. Fact is, most people use very few features. Also, no one needs 20+ call forwarding options. What they do need is a learn how your system will help them achieve their business goals – and that has nothing to do with the price of the seat.

The advertised price of the service online is rarely what you pay (see here). You have to educate the prospect on this. 60% don’t buy on price alone. Talk to the other 40%. If you think that the consumer should know all this stuff – and the difference in value between you and RC – well, you are deluded. Consumers don’t care about this stuff. They just have to have it as a tool for their business.

This mentality during this discussion might point out the fact that penetration of HPBX some 12 years after it launched is less than 20%!

from Seth Godin today: “The magic is this: As soon as you stop acting like you need every single vote, you can earn the votes of the people you seek to serve.”

$20 for a DVR?! $4 for channels that we already pay for?! And one is BHN’s own local sports channel that I never watch. This explains the lighter channel bundles like Sling TV from DISH, Boingo, VZ and more.

When you take a that is $115 and it comes to $175 consumers start cutting back – after feeling ripped off.

I know that telcos do the same thing, but when I see fees I know are just profit, it is annoying.

Imagine going to the store to buy pants. They charge you for the dressing room, to ring you up, for a bag, for the credit card fee, for the a/c and lighting. That’s what it feels like.

I have to agree with this stat:

“Only 46% of B2B #sales professionals think that the #marketing collateral they are provided is adequate.”

At best, collateral is a reminder or tool for brand awareness.

Some other sales stats:

More than a quarter of all B2B sales cycles take seven months or more to close. (Source: Harvard University and Gallup)

90% of business buyers say when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. (Source: DemandGen Report)
Which means that you better have your SEO on!

58% of buyers report that sales reps are unable to answer their questions effectively. (Source: Forbes Insight) — You might want to train your people on your products and process.

80% of the average salesperson’s day is spent on non-revenue generating activities, including not knowing where to find good prospects or recognizing them once they find them. (Source: TeleSmart.com) — I see this often. Companies don’t have a customer profile.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters.This book is on my reading list for 2015.

For those that don’t know, Peter Thiel made billions as co-founder of Paypal and Palantir. This book came from online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.

Reviews of the book demonstrate some of the book’s points.

Forbes: “Businesses succeed better when they differentiate rather than compete. Direct competition drains value as companies beat each other up. Differentiation creates value as companies charge more for desirable products and services that customers can’t get anywhere else. It’s the same principle that forms the basis of brand strategy. We’ve already seen many books on the subject, including 1981′s Positioning, by Jack Trout and Al Ries, and even classical writings on strategy by Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz.”

The Atlantic: “It’s refreshing to hear a techie extol the virtue of sales, and Thiel is good at explaining both why nerds hate marketers, and why the nerds are wrong. Nerds are skeptical of advertising, marketing, and sales, because they seem superficial,” he writes. “They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds don’t realize is that it also takes hard work to make sales look easy … If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.”

One good summary on Medium.

7 questions for Businesses from the book.

I just joined a virtual book club. We just finished Jeff Walker’s Launch Book and are working through INfluence right now, but Thiel’s book is in my stack for holiday reading. It should be in yours too.

2 resources about employees.

Serving Workers in the Gig Economy: Emerging Resources for the On-Demand Workforce from O’Reilly Publishing.

Hiring good tech people– where do you start?