I just started a two week Sprint on Positioning with Section4. They ask why you are taking the course. I said because I have spent 23 years in telecom where differentiation is non-existent. [Although cellular has tried to Differentiate, now it is all about 5G and price.] I read Jack Trout’s book, Positioning, around 2003. This course will update that for me (and my clients).

If you think that Everyone is your Customer, YOU ARE MISTAKEN.

And you are going to waste a lot of energy, money and time trying to sell to people who will not benefit!

Businesses that cannot afford it are not your customer.

Businesses with no need or no desire.

Healthcare isn’t a target unless you understand BAA and HIPAA. Dentists either.

Banks will not be a customer if you don’t understand security and compliance.

Hotels won’t be your customer unless you have a really cheap per seat rate – or a compelling solution beyond handsets!

The legal profession wants integration into CLIO.

So is Everyone your Target?

Product-Market Fit is a real thing.

Can your sales team sell to your target market? Do you have the right type of salesperson?

Peter Drucker said, “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” And “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” That is Product-Market fit. That is knowing who you help and how you help – and take your solutions to that segment.

Selling is tough when you don’t have a Value Proposition, don’t know why your customers buy or what they do with the service (how they benefit). It is tough when you are trying to push product on prospects – everyone. It is never everyone, unless you selling air, water or ivory soap.

 

So Channel Vision magazine’s CVX Expo 2022 on November 2-4 in Scottsdale AZ will be putting a premium on education for emerging services like SASE, CCaaS and more. The expo hall is filled! Beka Business Media (the parent of Channel Vision) is selling Pool Cabanas and Table Tops because demand for exhibiting at conferences is high with vendors right now. In addition, many new vendors have entered the channel in the last five years are looking for partners to sell their stuff.

I have complained about other conferences because the content has been lacking. This show educating partners is the focus. We are looking for panelists that have seen it and done it, who can provide a deconstructed sale, use case and concise, concrete examples.

I co-founded Ignite Tampa Bay in 2011. The format for that event is 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes to express an idea. A similar format is Pecha Kucha which is 20×20 for almost 7 minutes per speaker. We are thinking about a two hour block of that style presentations in order to force speakers to be quick and concise – and to get through a bunch of topics quickly. Ignite’s motto is “Entertain us, but make it quick’’. What do you think? Should we try that format?  Let me know on twitter @radinfo or in email (peter at radinfo.co )

Do you have a favorite Sales Engineer who can clearly and concisely discuss a sales scenario?  Is there a Partner who wants to discuss a sale in emerging services like AI, SASE, CCaaS, cyber-security, SD-WAN or a multi-vendor solution?  Sign them up via this link for a call for speakers.

Be Happy to hear your thoughts!

PS Best talk I ever gave was on Happiness at Ignite Tampa Bay in 2017

Recently I have heard/read that channel partners are competing with Big Consulting – PWC, Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, Tata, Bain, McKinsey, BCG, Capgemini, and E&Y. Mostly Accenture and Deloitte are mentioned, so I assume their names came up somewhere in a partner conversation.

Having done my fair share of consulting, when companies are hiring Big Consulting, it is for the brand. Not because anyone can point to either firm to say that they excel at anything. They can consult to any project. They are the Walmart of Consulting. No one gets fired for hiring the big firms Despite the McKinsey Pharma-FDA scandal  and the Arthur Anderson-Enron debacle, people still hire the Big Ten.

Most of what these companies do is around tax and management consulting. “Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax, and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands.”  As an aside Arthur Anderson was a CPA firm that handed in its license over Enron. Accenture emerged from the ashes of Arthur Anderson.

Accenture and Deloitte each rake in $50 billion in annual revenue. At that size,  the commissions off of telecom services are a pittance. This is the same problem CDW faces. At $18.5 Billion in revenue, even $48M in commissions is just 0.3% of revenue. Adding a million here or there is a hassle to account for, collect and in the case of commissions chase down!

Accenture has acquired 110 companies since 2019 –  cloud services, cybersecurity, digital transformation, data and analytics, managed services, sustainability and ad agencies. “Accenture’s areas of expertise include management consulting, systems integration and technology, business process outsourcing and application and infrastructure outsourcing.” [channele2e]

People think channel partners compete against Accenture? Accenture is spending $2.5B on acquisitions this year. They could literally buy all the PE backed TSBs and then some.

Accenture wants the PROJECTS to keep their 700K employees billing hours! Accenture owns PaaS and SaaS platforms, but people think they are looking for the UCaaS sale? They could buy almost any UCaaS shop.

TEM and CPA firms are becoming referral partners for channel partners. Some of them are like SCTC members who will not take commissions because they must remain neutral. The Big Ten would get pissed wasting so much time collecting commissions. It would cost them more to pay a finance person to collect them than they would make!

Now if you mean that partners are up against them for network design or WAN/LAN consulting, I would say that is possible at the Fortune 500 level, but again unlikely. When I was involved in a data center project for a F5000 company, the brand name consultants did not have any CCIE’s or network architects in play. That was filled by a boutique shop that brought me along. Not many have actually experience with the service providers or on hot cuts or the PSTN.

I know saying we compete against the Big Ten is a great way to say that the channel has reached new heights – and that the PE investment is justified – but why? Is this to power the PE investment?

What difference does it make? Do you think Powered by Avant/Telarus/AppSmart is going to ring some bell in the halls of teh C-Suite at F5000?

Think this way if you want, but the clock is ticking for when the PE guys want their investment back. Maybe this is how you exit: Telarus ends up on the third floor in the PWC building in Tampa or in cubicles in some of the 100+ offices Accenture has globally.

This is the prezo that Joel Maloff of Phone.com and I gave yesterday at ITEXPO. If you or your team need sales training to improve your cloud sales, please contact RAD-INFO Inc for a dynamic, entertaining and concrete (not theory) sales training.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1g879Pk06rkmo_igMkNNxPj3Zf2DPdgt8/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100244495697445744662&rtpof=true&sd=true

[or buy the book SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud on Amazon]

 

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco is a 1989 book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, according to Wikipedia. In the 80s KKR was the PE firm who bought RJR Nabisco via LBO. It was a $25 Billion deal in the 1980s!!

There is some similarity between the 80s and today. PE firms have “helped” companies go from public to private – best example is Dell. In the process, the company takes on a heap of debt. To pay that debt back, the company will try to go public again in a 3 to 5 year time frame.

When a Private Equity firm gives a company money, there is an unspoken deal that the PE firm will – in some way – get a return on that investment in a 3 to 5 year time frame.

In the UCaaS space, investors have waited 10 years to get paid back. Fuze is a great example. Fuze investors put in almost $500M but sold it to 8×8 for $250M to just exit. WE are seeing this with the Mitel deal. The investors were tired of waiting for a return, so took the best deal they could get – it so happened to be $675M from RNG.

Upstack, Bluewave, Bridgepoint, Lightyear, Telarus, Avant, AppSmart and the rest have signed deals totaling $650M or so from investors (mainly PE firms). That is $650M in debt that will need to be paid back.

Even if we think about it as a mortgage with a 15% interest rate, a $10M mortgage with 10% interest has a monthly payment of $108K for 15 years.  Just to give some idea of the money we are talking about.

A broker/agency/TSB has 3 possible revenue streams: commissions, MDF and resale. If they choose to white label or resell circuits (like AT&T APEX program). The margin on resale can be a lot better than commissions. Reselling Google, Dropbox and Microsoft licenses is a better margin than 10% on cable modems.

So consider that Dell was able to IPO to pay off its PE. RJR Nabisco fell apart. Usually a lot of debt during a recession leaves a company without a way to navigate the poor economic waters.

A lot of companies in the IT/telecom space have been acquired by PE – PGi, TPX, Datto, and many more. How many are doing well?

History has a tendency to repeat itself.

Don’t let the Barbarians get your commissions.