The last two years have been something else.

Cyber-security, AI, and cloud communications were big in 2020 and 2021 – and that won’t slow down in 2022. As Ransomware, malware and bad actors increase threats, MSPs and IT departments will be looking for tools to fight back. Cyber-security partners will need to get a lot better on telling the story about what they do. A good example comes out of the VoIP DDoS attacks that we witnessed in 2021. Bandwidth and the others did not turn to Lumen or their data center for DDoS Mitigation despite their waving that flag (“DDoS Mitigation! Get it here!”). They went to Cloudflare. That says a lot!

There has been a ton of M&A in the channel, MSP space and the cybersec space. McAffe, Fireeye and so many others were scooped up by private equity. We will see a slew of new offerings in 2022. I just hope they finally brand it better and attach a story to it, otherwise it will be difficult to sell. We can look up what UTM stands for, but where’s the use case for what it actually provides. Take a page from Pharma TV ads, please, Cyber-Sec CMOs!

There’s an increasing need for cyber-security services but partners need help learning it and explaining it to prospects.

AI will permeate more…if that is possible. It will be everywhere that it can be bolted on. (We just didn’t pay attention to the Terminator.)

CPaaS and CX will eat UCaaS in 2022. UCaaS has always been a junk term. It is meaningless now that businesses need self-service, omni-channel, remote work, notifications and more.

The Great Resignation and the increasing need for quicker customer service means that cloud contact center functions are going mainstream. You can see that with 8×8, NEC and Intermedia adding CCaaS functions to their UC offerings.

Customers will want a seamless experience no matter the channel they select to contact the company. This will result in omni-channel expanding and orgs selecting cloud contact center in place of UCaaS to put the whole org on a single platform, since everyone’s job is customer service and sales.

Omni-channel also means that inter-operability between messaging and meeting apps would be welcome. We’ll see if that happens in 2022.

Voice gets an extension because asynchronous communication is showing signs of being useful in a hybrid workplace. Record once and send. Great for managers; on-boarding employees and partners; and so much more. Call recording getting new life.

Use cases are vital, moreso in 2022 when sales has to demonstrate benefits and differentiation. 2020 was the year of answering the phone to win business. It isn’t 2020 any longer. Time to start defining benefits, outcomes and ways that your service offering differs from the top names.

Office space will change. The CEO of Cogent shed some light on office space HERE. Co-working and smaller spaces will be leveraged more. Office design will need to account for noise levels and interruptions that people aren’t used to after two years of being homebound.

We all recognize that where work occurs is shifting, but management has to shift too. The Great Resignation is a sign of that. Hiring practices, lack of employee training, sparse on-boarding processes and what a manager is will need to be addressed. Technology alone will not fill the gap. There has never been a better time to get feedback from employees about ways to improve. As Tom Peters proclaims, EX is CX. Happy employees mean happy customers. A lousy employee experience won’t make the customer experience better. The days of a keg and a foosball table being the props to a cool workplace will have to be replaced with actual ingredients to culture and EX.

Data centers changed hands like playing cards in 2021. They will be building more data centers for the big cloud players like Microsoft, FB, Amazon and Google. More servers, more power, more cooling — climate change?! More connectivity. Plus quantum computing, bitcoin mining, and edge computing. Smaller data centers in secondary and tertiary markets to get closer to users.

Oh and 5G! I already want to puke when I hear the term, but it is just getting started. AT&T and VZW will go ahead with plans to put 5G everywhere while disrupting airplane landings, weather tracking and nuclear power plants

M&A will continue. Money is still cheap and plentiful. AppSmart, Avant and Upstack still have millions to spend. Private equity will continue to spend money on service providers. PE is even getting into telco (Lumen selling CenturyTel assets to Apollo.) We’ll see if any of these newly minted or recently merged entities can get their synergies together and deliver in 2022. Most likely not-so-much! Bigger is never better in the world of telecom.

Here’s hoping COVID-19 subsides in the new year.

The key to sales is in the Discovery process.

The person who asks the best questions wins!

Beyond Budget, time frame, and decision process, there needs to be probing questions that identify the business outcome sought or the pain to be resolved. It shows Interest. It shows that you want to help them to where the puck is going.

What happens if you don’t make a timely decision about this service? What happens to the business, the employees, the KPIs?

There are so many questions – at least 3! – to be asked even about Connectivity to shift that sale from just a pipe to SD-WAN or SASE or cloud connect or something else that would benefit the business and the outcome. Only way to know is to ask a couple of extra questions.

Another Trusted Advisor tip: if you can talk about what 3 or 4 other similar businesses did, you can really help that prospect with his decision making! The last 3 banks we worked with, bought this and that from vendor A and F. This opens up a discussion – and verifies you as a Trusted Advisor!

Sales is really about being interested. It is about who asks the best questions. In this webinar on Thursday December 9, 2021 at Noon Eastern time, RAD-INFO Inc. will present 3 sales questions that will make you more money.

In this 40 minute session, you will learn what questions to ask to uncover more opportunity which will allow you to help the customer more, gain stickiness and increase average revenue per sale.

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This has been another big week in M&A in the UCaaS space. Last week we had Mitel quit UCaaS to focus on the PBX business while selling IP to RingCentral and becoming another RNG reseller.

This week the biggest news is Vonage finally selling. When the Vonage board hired Rory Read I guess they were looking for a salesman. Ericcson is buying Vonage for $6.2B in cash. Ericcson bought Cradlepoint last year. Cradlepoint is a CPE maker with 4G/5G service contracts (MVNO for data as backup). That kind of fits into ERiccson’s line of business. Apparently now Ericcson wants to get into the cloud PaaS business. Good luck!

In March (2021) Twilio, one of the largest CPaaS players, invested $750M into Syniverse. Syniverse handles wireless LNP, cellular traffic exchange and MMS gateways for cellcos globally. Twilio invested to improve their MMS traffic performance since the rules for SMS/MMS traffic were changing. Syniverse went public via a SPAC transaction in August for $2.8B. Twilio made out. Market cap today for Twilio is $50B with less than $2B in revenue. Vonage revenue is $1.2B and much of that is CPaaS. It was a steal to buy Vonage (Nexmo) for the CPaaS business to compete with Syniverse, which I think is where Ericcson is going.

I do find it funny that Jon Arnold didn’t like the Ericcson-Vonage transaction – and labeled it a risky UCaaS play when I think Ericcson did this for Nexmo. This is about Mobility – 5G + cloud comms.

Let’s not forget that Ericcson partnered with AT&T and Telarus to launch the SMB 5G-ready virtual workspace service this past May (2021). This leveraged Cradlepoint. Maybe the future of WFA (work from anywhere) is a virtual workspace that includes dial-tone, messaging, video and text. That could easily be powered by Vonage.

The one million developers that Vonage has courted into is ecosystem (I hate that word right now) were mainly playing with apps that look like Uber, Lyft or Doordash, powered by CPaaS for payment, communications and more. Now Ericcson will push these developers globally and maybe attach that to the WFA offering. Who knows? But I do not think that UCaaS was the play here. Nor CCaaS. Twilio may have jumped into CCaaS alongside Microsoft, Amazon and others but I don’t think that is the direction Ericcson is looking. I think it centers around 5G and mobility, something that Verizon has firmly embraced. (Give a listen here.) T-Mobile is trying to embrace this but Verizon has the only mobile UC offering (OneTalk).

If you stretch that out you could see Ericcson white labeling the entire stack that would allow any of the telcos or cellcos globally to create a service offering from Vonage’s stack of functionality.

Another big transaction is BCM One buying Coredial. BCM One already acquired Skyswitch, a large white label UCaaS provider leveraging the Netsapiens softswitch. Coredial was utilizing Asterisk then Broadsoft. In 2018 Coredial acquired Voice4Net for its contact center offerings. Last year, Coredial bought eZuce for video to better compete with the Big 3 Public UC players. Coredial also has a quote to bill OSS/BSS.

BCM One now has two large white label providers for UCaaS. They also have a significant managed SIP trunking business coupled with a network aggregator/reseller.

There has been much M&A in the CPaaS space. Sinch is the other large global CPaaS provider and they have been on an M&A tear in 2021 buying Inteliquent and MessageMedia.

There has been much M&A in the CPaaS space. Sinch is the other large global CPaaS provider and they have been on an M&A tear in 2021 buying Inteliquent and MessageMedia.

IQstel is acquiring Smartbiz Telecom, a provider of VoIP and SMS services.

Mobile and business messaging solutions provider Mavenir has acquired CPaaS provider, Telestax.

This is one way to segment the US market – for any B2B product.

Each segment has one or more Buyer personas. Each segment procures B2B products in a variety of ways. For example, very small businesses procure products from marketplaces (like Amazon) or directly (ecommerce) or through a Trusted Advisor. The messaging changes with each Buyer Persona and each segment of the marketplace.

Enterprises buy cloud comms based on integration. Some of the largest deals that the Big Public 3 UCaaS providers close depend on Salesforce integrations according to investor filings. That probably is less significant to mid-market or smaller.

Enterprise also tend to buy from the biggest brands because no one ever got fired for buying IBM, AT&T or Verizon. Microsoft and Cisco own the enterprise space.

You should know what your Buyers are looking for. Most buyers will do online research and won’t contact the vendor until they are almost two-thirds of the way to a decision. Your content strategy better align with the Buyer – or you won’t be in the running.

Why do you think that Verizon has a plan and websites and buyer personas for every segment? According to Alex Doyle (in this podcast), Verizon’s Executive Director, Advanced Communications Products, there is a strategy around small business, mid-market and enterprise. There is a product bundle for each segment. Verizon knows Buyer Persona.

So the next time you say your target is 1-1000, you better have a strategy on how that is going to work for go-to-market because you can’t treat the enterprise buyer like the SMB buyer.

Also, today each organization has different buyers; it goes beyond the IT department procuring software and services. Marketing, HR, and so many other departments are buying IT without IT input. Your messaging will need to address that.