If marketing is everything, then selling is for everyone. Your entire company should be – if not actively selling – at least pitching your company and its services when appropriate. As I said during my breakfast session, they need to all be on the same page with the message. You want everyone telling the same elevator pitch. Not 20 versions.

That said, I was asked to do some CSR (customer service rep) and Technician soft selling training. So here it is.

Do you want fries with that?

Do you have customer service reps that could use some training on how to upsell or cross-sell on calls? I originally did this training for an ILEC in 2010. Register your people today for less than $25! For an hour webinar filled with tips for upselling and cross-selling for CSR’s on Wed., July 30th at Noon Eastern time.

Training includes a worksheet (in PDF) and the ability to watch the playback for a month.

For technicians, we will have a soft selling webinar on Wed., August 6, 2014 @ Noon Eastern.

If you want more customized training, just contact the office at 813-963-5884. Thank you.

In the article, Why Americans Hate Big Business by Bruce Bialosky, this quote said it all:

“It is not that you make a mistake, as everyone makes mistakes, but it is how you deal with the mistake that keeps your customers satisfied.”

Flying back yesterday, I read a novel on my kindle and then switched over to a business book – or more accurately Tom Peters 100 Ways pdf. I had to take notes every couple of pages.

#10: The best prepared, hardest working, best researched wins! Definitely. As a presenter / speaker / trainer, I want to deliver a WOW! experience for my audience every time. When they leave the room, I want them thinking. I can only do that if I am prepared and well researched.

MBWA – management by walking around. When I first get a project, I like to talk to as many employees, customers, partners as I can of the client company. I like to sit in the cubes and listen. You find out an awful lot. MBWA. It still works 30 years after Tom Peters first wrote about in his book, In Search of Excellence.

Make every day matter.

#15: WHATʼS THE DREAM? In almost every company I have worked with, I have found that if there is a culture, a unifying vision that the employees can grasp and fight for, the company is better off. Tom Peters says it is the Dream, the Plan, the Vision, the “Brand statement. Animating idea. Beliefs.” Simon Sinek says it starts with WHY. I have seen it.

Seek customer feedback. You only think you know until you ask them.

See you in Atlanta next week. Catch me at the 8:30 Sales & Marketing talk where I am going to verbally punch you in the face!

Two years ago (2012) at the FISPA Atlanta show, the executives at AT&T were being peppered with questions about the products available to combat cable. DSL and U-Verse (VDSL) are what is available for the small business. But what I heard (that went unsaid) is that AT&T had given up on the Small Business space.

The retire the copper mantra is really about getting higher ARPU and putting the cabash on CLECs. VZ is co-marketing cable, so you know that they have given up competing with cable.

This week, “Jeff Gardner, CEO of Windstream, told investors that cable will continue to focus most of its attention on the small to medium (SMB) business space. The customers that cable is chasing typically spend less than $750 a month. Unlike the larger enterprise space, SMB customers usually require a phone line and some data but not the managed services that Windstream provides.” [fierce]

Basically, single site small business is being left for cable. Unless the small business is spending $750 or buying a bundles solution (more than just voice and broadband), the larger ILECs are giving that market to cable.

Now Frontier and Fairpoint will take that business all day long. But what is strange is that more than 70% of Windstream’s revenue comes from selling broadband. More than 70%!!!! If you give up the ghost on broadband, you better be closing a lot of multi-site business, which is almost as hyper-competitive as government, education and healthcare.

Good advice: “Gardner said. “And so it’s incumbent upon us to really focus over the next 15 to 24 months, as they are preoccupied with this large transaction and all the challenges that a big merger like that brings, to really continue to improve our game, to get better at that enterprise space so that we’re well-positioned with our customers as they get better in this space.”” Get your act together and shore up your market in the next year!

Note cable: “Comcast Business Services revenues rose 23.9 percent to $917 million. Likewise, Time Warner Cable reported business revenues rose to $402 million due to increases in high-speed data and voice subscribers, organic growth in cell tower backhaul.” And Gardner is also worried because while TWC does a lot of wholesale business, Comcast notsomuch buh-bye.

One good thing about the VoIP industry is that a number of companies have helped make VoIP a household name – Vonage, 8×8, MagicJack, SunRocket and RingCentral to name a few. One result is an awareness of the concept. Awareness is marketing for the whole industry. (Kind of like Microsoft with Lync or talking cloud all day. It raises the ocean for all providers.)

So many of my ITSP clients reference RC (or stalk them). They do have a nice website and have put in the long, hard work for affiliate marketing. Not easy to replicate either thing.

One ITSP chose to directly compare themselves to RC. See it HERE.

Keep in mind that when companies mention RC or others, it is because of brand awareness. It is your job to educate the customer on the differences. They will compare you like apples to apples unless you explain that you are a grapefruit.