I received an email blast from Birch today announcing sub-$20 pricing on Hosted PBX seats.

There are certainly folks selling HPBX under $20 per seat, just haven’t seen a national provider advertise it. And certainly I hear and see quotes with the pricing sub-$20 for deals during bidding as everyone wants to book any revenue possible. (The valuations seem to be about revenue and ARPU not profit margin.)

Have you read the 2015 US Hosted PBX Market report by RAD-INFO? Click here.

Most of my consulting gigs have been coach up. Salespeople, marketers, business owners, entrepreneurs – coach them up to the next level. Teach them to fish (or a new way to fish).

If you have a marketing person or a salesperson, who fits the culture but could be doing a better job in your opinion, let’s get them coached up.

In the past, I have worked with a number of marketing teams to get them up to speed on social media, messaging, lead gen, branding, direct mail and email marketing. Marketing is a time intensive process that trickles in little pieces of success. It is not a button to be pushed. There isn’t a shortcut. There is just a lot of little things to do for success.

What marketers are required to do today is not what was taught at school. Marketing used to be about branding, PR, advertising and very little online. Today, it is social selling, content, publishing, analytics, along with old school tactics like email and direct mail.

You can outsource some of that to an agency. Some of it

Sales is more about daily activity and time management than anything else. You have to make contact with people every single day, as many ways as possible for success. Networking, social selling, relationship building and educating the marketplace are just a few of the things required for success.

Ten years ago, Hosted VoIP was mainly POTS replacement. Today, UCaaS has become a collection of components used for wrokplace collaboration and persistent communications. Slack (launched in 2013 now has 100m users) and Lync (in 2007) weren’t even around 10 years ago! A lot changes in 10 years.

Communications has changed. The idea of the office has changed. Sales has changed drastically in the last 10 years. Not only what we sell, but how we sell and the buyers’ process.

Let RAD-INFO coach up your sales and marketing talent to take your company to the next level. Call or email the office today!

I was asked today what it takes to win (against the Duopoly). It is pretty easy actually.

A Good Bundle that your target market wants: (a) to buy (b) from you; (c) can afford to buy from you; (d) and provides value to them.

Next, take care of your employees, who will in turn take care of your customers.

Foster a culture of fanatical customer service – like Rackspace or Zappos.

Have a clear, concise message (story) that resonates with your target market (and is easy to re-tell).

Spread the word to your target market.

Product and Marketing are the only two components that a company needs. – Peter Drucker.

Want help Competing? Call our office at 813-963-5884 or get the mp3 of our compete webinar.

Telergee is a research firm that benchmarks the 800 small rural telcos (RLECs) in the US. The 2015 Telergee Benchmarking Study is based on 197 responses – about 25% which is a good response rate.

The top note from the study, “Declining margins are an ongoing issue for small rural telcos… The average small telco saw margins drop 1.7% between 2013 and 2014, despite a 2.1% increase in average revenues.”

However, they are investing — probably because they HAVE to. There are 2 transitions taking place for RLECs – the TDM to IP transition that every voice provider is subject to and the transition from voice to broadband as the benchmark for USF funds. The investment is in fiber to the home and fiber to the tower, as well as softswitch for Hosted VoIP.

“Small telco margins are based on a mix of their traditional wireline voice business and newer non-regulated businesses such as video and wireless. … Non-regulated margins were 4.2% — an increase of 2.1% over 2013. But regulated margins were just .8% — a decrease of 7.5% from 2013.”

“A typical small rural telco gets less than half of its revenue from end users, according to financial data collected by the Telergee Alliance – a group of accounting firms that specialize in rural telecom. On average, small rural telcos get about 45.2% of revenues from end users, with the remainder coming from state and federal Universal Service programs (25.7%), interexchange carriers (18.4%) and other sources (7.2%).” [telecompetitor]

“Telergee tracks results for four of the most common such services that telcos have been offering – Internet, video, wireless and competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC).” It makes me wonder how many RLECs are also the cableco and the cellco for their area. No data that I could find on that, although 25% of respondents had some wireless (cellular) business. The cell business was usually resale, often USF subsidized, and in most cases operates at breakeven.

On TV – the study emphasizes what I have advised in the past: “Video is another commonly offered service for rural telcos, with 130 out of 197 in Telergee’s study offering either IPTV or traditional cable TV. But the economics of video service are considerably less positive than for broadband Internet. Video customer growth was virtually flat between 2013 and 2014, according to Telergee. And although video revenues were up 5.6%, that was largely because companies had to increase prices to help cover increased content costs, Skidmore said. Margins were slim, with the median company’s video business actually operating at a loss.”

Interesting look at the financial side of the RLEC, rural telco. The largest of these are Windstream, Frontier and Fairpoint. Most take CAF money for broadband expansion. Most face an uphill battle for revenue that was showcased by WVT/Alteva recently.

“It’s possible that he thinks his job is to be a clerk, to keep people from stealing things, to type letters into a computer and to read the results out loud as he stands at the cash register. If that’s the case, this store, like all stores staffed by clerks who are taught to be merely clerks, is doomed.” This is from Seth Godin’s blog. It leads me to think of Kevin Smith’s Clerks movies. The clerks don’t actually work. They annoy customers and other employees.

I think many businesses have clerks. No on-boarding. No training. No one shadowing or mentoring or coaching them. That results in a loss of money. And if you are trying to build a company to last, it will likely result in a disruption in culture.

You want empowered employees who take initiative and maybe treat the company likes it is their own. They make better decisions that way.

Take care of the employees and they will take care of the customers.

In another blog, Seth writes, “If you embrace special orders, you’re doing something difficult, scarce and worth seeking out. If you handle them begrudgingly, you’re likely to undo the very goodwill you sought to create.”

Special orders don’t scale but they can increase the lifetime value of the customer – and if done really well, increase word of mouth.