So the CEO at Cincinnati Bell has his panties in a bunch because CinBell isn’t getting enough credit for its fiber projects. The Cincinnati City Council voted to invite Google Fiber into town. The CEO thinks that the City Council doesn’t know what the ILEC has been up to.

“Since 2010, Cincinnati Bell has invested $269 million in fiber construction, installation and value-added services. In 2014, we will invest more than $80 million. Today, our fiber network spans approximately 5,700 route miles – reaching more than 7,000 businesses and more than 276,000 households.”

In some respects, the CinBell CEO sounds like he is a small ISP providing rural broadband that is about to be over-built with federal dollars by the LEC. Ironic isn’t it?

It points to a couple of things:

• CinBell spent so much time on the data center and cloud business leading up to its 2013 spin off of Cyrus One that it didn’t do enough PR on the fiber broadband front.
• Second, it seems every community wants to be a Google Fiberhood.
• Third, he beats the local bell loud – jobs, community, charity, investment.

Thought you might enjoy that. Plus it’s a reminder to do some PR when building fiber and to beat your own Local drum. Learn from a billion dollar LEC.

BTW, CinBell is making $100 million per year on fiber Gigabit broadband.

The best way to sell is to tell a story that is relevant to the prospect. For example, a story about his rival or how a similar business benefited from your services. Basically, a case story – but the story telling is important. Story telling is how we paint a picture for the prospect; it’s how we make them visualize the solution – and most important remember that picture (if the story is good enough.)

We have had a pretty frozen winter in most of the US. Here’s how one company turned snow days into a reason to buy Hosted UC (but it will work for any Hosted Voice solution).

Here is a story written by the newspaper publisher in northeast Georgia ripping Centurylink’s Internet service a new one. Note that the publisher talks about how vital Internet Access is today. He talks about how essential Internet is to any work environment. This too is a story you can start to tell.

Telling is Selling.

I emailed my list this morning the blog post by Seth Godin, Will They Switch for Cheaper. Some will, many will switch for better.

I have hammered this point many times. I appreciate when someone like Seth can clarify my point for me.

You only need 1000 or 2000 customers that will value your service and pay you for it. If you want to go cheap, you need more than that.

CenturyLink just added a new fee and raised the rate on another one to consumers. Subscriber count went down, but profit went up. A client of mine just raised his pricing to a subset of his customers. He lost 0.25% – roughly 2 out of thousand, but the price increase means he is more profitable than before. I’m not saying gouge your customers, but I am saying you don’t have to be the cheapest. You might have to be the cheapest if you offer little value, don’t tell an interesting story or think of yourself as a commodity.

C-Link didn’t improve any service; they didn’t make anything better. That’s not the nature of getting bigger. Bigger is hardly ever better. (Even bigger meals just mean more calories). “As an organization succeeds, it gets bigger. As it gets bigger, the average amount of passion and initiative of the organization goes down (more people gets you closer to average, which is another word for mediocre),” writes Seth Godin.

How do you get better? At every customer touch point. Most companies are automating everything they can. That means less touches of the customer, more cookies being cut, less customization and less customer interaction. If you want to get better, touch the customer better. It’s so easy today because the bar is so low.

There are so many VoIP Providers – at least 1000. They aren’t doing any marketing – well, any good marketing. They aren’t targeted or know who would make a good customer and why. They aren’t concerned with turning the kinks in the deployment / implementation process into strengths and customer killer moments. At the low end, deployment is the customer getting phones by UPS and having to plug-and-pray. Make it better. There are so many ways to do it routinely.

The trick to marketing: Deliver service so good that people HAVE to talk about it!

Check out my blog post about how ShoreTel broke M5. It’s worth the read.

The FCC wants to update the E-rate program. The FCC is seeking focused comments about how to improve the E-rate program, its administration, and the speeds to the schools.

“The Federal Communications Commission has gone public with plans to “reprioritize” existing E-rate funds over the next two years in order to invest an additional $2 billion toward putting broadband and wireless networks into 15,000 schools representing 20 million students. The news comes at the same time as an announcement from the White House that three major telecommunications service providers are committing $100 million each to providing broadband and wireless access and related services to schools and students over the next three to four years.” [thejournal]

Two other updates from the FCC this week.

One is that “FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced that the commission has a new task force called Connect2Health. The new task force will be led by Michele Ellison and will focus on accelerating “the adoption of health care technologies by leveraging broadband and other next-gen communications services.” [source] [FCC notice]

The final announcement is that DISH Networks “bought all of the 1900 MHz licenses in a frequency auction that wrapped up last week, using a shell company to hide its name. The satellite provider paid just short of $1.6 billion for the airwaves.” [engadget] To clarify that means that DISH got 2 separate (non-contiguous) blocks of spectrum: “The agency has voted in favor of auctioning off two slices of 1,900MHz spectrum, the lower H block (1,915MHz to 1,920MHz) and upper H block (1,995MHz to 2,000MHz)”. [Thx Chuck]

I think I read Seth and Hugh because they make me think. They make me question my approach, my outlook, my work. (I hope you have someone like that too.)

I am reading Unmistakable with much head nodding. The author (Srinivas Rao aka “Srini”) and James Altucher are both honest, outspoken writers like I try to be.

Tom Peters re-vamped his website recently. (When was the last time you re-did YOUR website?) TP was in Tampa Bay last year (I missed it), giving a talk at Jabil, one of Tampa Bay’s largest employers. His talk was about Excellence obviously, since his fame comes from his 30+ year old book, In Search of Excellence. However, one slide stands out: “Everything in existence tends to deteriorate.” Talent, Hiring, Execution, XFX (Cross-Functional Excellence), GRG (the Great Relationship Game = the only game in town), Managers, Listening, Branding (Brand = Talent), Training, Risk and Failing are all topics in the 160 slides. These are just the ones on Strategy.

“Execution is Strategy.”

“Costco figured out the big, simple things and executed with total fanaticism.” —Charles Munger, Berkshire Hathaway

“In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. Pick a general direction … and implement like hell.” —Jack Welch

“The art of war does not require complicated maneuvers; the simplest are the best and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder how it is generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever.” — Napoleon

There is so much valuable information available today – free and cheap – that can be consumed easily – video, audio, PDF, blog, books, power point, webinar – that your people should be encouraged to seek improvement, knowledge, skills and personal development. Invest in them and they will invest in you.