It is Monday. Salespeople are dragging into the office for another week of smiling and dialing. I say this often but sales has changed. It is mainly inbound and mainly through search. So if you don’t have a content marketing strategy, you are not even in the conversation. Buyers are informed via the Internet and social networks. Prices are transparent too. By the time a customer reaches out to you, they are almost done with the purchasing process.

One thing to keep in mind is that the transition from server to cloud is one that is triggered. Rarely are businesses waking up and saying let’s transition to cloud today. There has to be a trigger – something breaks or a move or some event (new investor, invigorated owner, something). At that time, your company, your brand, your service or at least your salesperson better be top of mind – salient.

Marketing has many parts: branding, PR, advertising, et al. The big ones today are website/online marketing, content, social, email and drip marketing. That is a lot to handle. And you are saying: Pffft, he’s crazy. It’s fine. We are still growing. Okay. Maybe you don’t need it YET.

Salespeople should be learning too. Training of some kind — or at the least reading. Here are a couple of good reads:

Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine
Seth Godin’s blog
40 THINGS TO DO WHEN BUSINESS IS SLOW (TO HELP GROW YOUR BUSINESS)

Tom Peters’ book list.

Books to boost your Creativity, an ingredient in sales and innovation.

So I found some older data on FTTH from Calix and Corning that might interest you.  And the VZ FiOS presentation from 2006. Buffalo news article detailing FiOS costs.

The Parallel SMB Cloud study of 2014 is here.

VoIP Logic did a survey of Hosted VoIP. These are some highlights:

• 67.5% of Service Providers are willing to outsource some or all of their revenue generating technology.
• Both the selection of telephones and other customer premise equipment (66.8%) and the selection of network type (80.1%) are considered to be very important or crucial to the success of the opportunity. [Note: This is inconsistent with an emerging trend of bring your own device (BYOD) and reliance on the public Internet which indicates that Service Providers might not find BYOD a favorable development.]
• The three most prevalent services sold by Service Providers who work with VoIP technology are Hosted PBX (61%), SIP Trunking (54%) and Data Networking, which includes IP, MPLS and point-to-point circuits (33.9%)
• Over a third of all Service Providers (34.1%) do NOT have a disaster recovery strategy that employs geographic redundancy or fail-over in the event of a disruption of service at their primary site. Considering that outage sensitivity is rated as so relevant and geographic backup is highly correlated with uptime, this is surprising. 
• The three most desirable characteristics when selecting technology for a VoIP service offering are Expected Uptime (33%), Stable and Well Regarded Technology (33%) and Cost (20%). While Uptime and Cost are tangible characteristics that lead to happier customers and better profit margins – and are therefore expected – Well Regarded Technology is aspirational (and, generally, more expensive). 
• The three most highly ranked characteristics that contribute to a successful commercial strategy – sales and customer retention – are Existing Customer Relationship (52%), Pricing (13%) and Customer Support (9%). These are not surprising – especially among smaller operators who rely on personalized interaction – though the degree to which an existing relationship outstrips all other factors is an important data point when gauging which sales strategies have the greatest chance of success.

So I found some older data on FTTH from Calix and Corning that might interest you.  And the VZ FiOS presentation from 2006. Buffalo news article detailing FiOS costs.

The Parallel SMB Cloud study of 2014 is here.

VoIP Logic did a survey of Hosted VoIP. These are some highlights:

• 67.5% of Service Providers are willing to outsource some or all of their revenue generating technology.
• Both the selection of telephones and other customer premise equipment (66.8%) and the selection of network type (80.1%) are considered to be very important or crucial to the success of the opportunity. [Note: This is inconsistent with an emerging trend of bring your own device (BYOD) and reliance on the public Internet which indicates that Service Providers might not find BYOD a favorable development.]
• The three most prevalent services sold by Service Providers who work with VoIP technology are Hosted PBX (61%), SIP Trunking (54%) and Data Networking, which includes IP, MPLS and point-to-point circuits (33.9%)
• Over a third of all Service Providers (34.1%) do NOT have a disaster recovery strategy that employs geographic redundancy or fail-over in the event of a disruption of service at their primary site. Considering that outage sensitivity is rated as so relevant and geographic backup is highly correlated with uptime, this is surprising. 
• The three most desirable characteristics when selecting technology for a VoIP service offering are Expected Uptime (33%), Stable and Well Regarded Technology (33%) and Cost (20%). While Uptime and Cost are tangible characteristics that lead to happier customers and better profit margins – and are therefore expected – Well Regarded Technology is aspirational (and, generally, more expensive). 
• The three most highly ranked characteristics that contribute to a successful commercial strategy – sales and customer retention – are Existing Customer Relationship (52%), Pricing (13%) and Customer Support (9%). These are not surprising – especially among smaller operators who rely on personalized interaction – though the degree to which an existing relationship outstrips all other factors is an important data point when gauging which sales strategies have the greatest chance of success.