A white label VoIP provider has called on me a number of times over the past four years. The latest exchange is why I am writing a blog post about the Number 1 Sales Tip for Cold Calls.

I looked the company up on LinkedIn. They have 31 employees on there and most of them are in sales. That makes me wonder if they actually run a “global dial-tone platform” since you would need some engineers and network folks. Yet if most of your people are in sales, shouldn’t the company be running on a CRM? I sure hope it isn’t ACT! running on Win 95!

How do they not have a history of contact with me? Or the fact that I have expressed to them a number of times that I don’t white label anything.

Yesterday I received a snarky email from them. I replied snarky: “Name one of my blogs and I will have a chat with you.” Apparently, the sales guy didn’t understand that he could Google me and find that info in two minutes. And that is the lesson right there: DO SOME RESEARCH!

We live in a digital world. It is rare someone has zero digital footprint.

In this pandemic situation, the gurus have been crawling out of the woodwork to preach and teach “social selling“.

This year I presented several workshops on Virtual Selling – research was one topic. The more you know, the more rapport you can build. The more you know, the better you can identify targets. [see Salesforce and Hubspot articles]

Sales is about a win-win — both sides win, not just the vendor collecting a check. Selling is about building a solution that benefits the buyer and gets them closer to their business goals.

The company that cold called me uses Sandler for training (the BD guy told me.) Sandler is pretty good for theory – and they make a great lead source for my training. If your company went through Sandler training and sales haven’t improved, let me come in and clear that up for your sales team. Call the office (813) 963-5884 for the best telecom sales training – and the only channel manager training!

I used to be a big Jeffrey Gitomer fan, even attending several of his in-person training classes. I think his Sales Bible is one of the best for anyone in sales. He has two new books out: (1) The Very Little but Very Powerful Book on Closing: Ask the Right Questions, Transfer the Value, Create the Urgency, and Win the Sale! and (2) Sales Manifesto. After watching a few of his webinars this year, I just can’t. The reviews helped me decide to skip it, too. Every guru eventual succumbs to hubris and it isn’t pretty.

There are a few books that I really need to finish:

• Tom Peters’ The Excellence Dividend;
• Calm the F*ck Down by Sarah Knight;
• This is Marketing by Seth Godin.
• I couldn’t get through Mark Manson’s Everything is F*cked book (about hope).

The Algebra of Happiness was pretty good. Habits of a Happy Brain was helpful. Need something positive? Olivia Holmes Has Invented a Vineyard.

Just ordered: Create the Future + the Innovation Handbook: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking.

What have I been reading mostly during the pandemic? I love spy and detective novels. It is a way to escape for a few hours. This year I have read a slew of them:

• Brad Thor’s Near Dark & Backlash.
• Daniel Silva’s The Order & The New Girl.
• The new series – Revengers – by Marcus Wynne
• Randy Wayne White’s Salt River.
• Despite his death, Robert B Parker’s main characters – Spencer, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall – live on with new writers, like Ace Atkins, Reed Coleman and Mike Lupica – with Angel Eyes, The Bitterest Pill and Grudge Match.

Michael Connelly, Vince Flynn (Lethal Agent), Mark Greaney, Mark Dawson, Robert Crais (A Dangerous Man), David Hagberg, Barry Eisler (Killer Collective), Eric Van Lustbader and Lawrence Block round out my list of favorite authors.

Has anyone done adult coloring books?

I am working on two books. I should have finished my sixth book by now – Channel Sales Enablement. I am also working on Virtual Selling, an ebook that will be about $1.99 when I get it finished.

Tell me what you have been reading…

When looking at cloud contact center (CCC or CCaaS), my biggest observation is that pure play contact center providers (Genesys, Serenova, et al) are built for primarily inbound contact centers and secondarily for outbound call centers. That is great for call centers, big customer service departments and inside sales boiler rooms. There isn’t really any collab or UCaaS functionality, so that CCC piece is layered on top of the UCaaS or CPaaS (which is the case with Twilio Flex, Amazon Connect and Talkdesk). The buyer is paying $150 per agent per month on top of the telephony piece – and more with add-ons.

The CCaaS providers that are mainly offering UCaaS have a module for call center that is more general purpose. This can be sold to departments or lines of business as a functional add-on to the UC&C play.

Microsoft Teams is kind of doing the same thing. Office365 became Teams utilizing the Skype4Biz video calling and chat module and expanding it. It is email, chat, video calls, conferencing and phone. It can be used as a fully functioning PBX. Microsoft even supplies dial-tone in other parts of the world. It went Office docs, Sharepoint (file sharing), Skype/Lync (for calls, chat, video) to PBX and the full UC&C suite. And in WFH it is a winner because it was a familiar look (employees were acquainted with Outlook and Office products) with collaboration first and telephony second. Conferencing and chat are winning the work-from-home race.

In the UCaaS (unified communications) sector, the winners on most analysts’ lists are all homemade platforms. Avaya, Mitel, 8×8, Vonage, RingCentral, Nextiva, Fuze, Star2Star and LogMeIn (Jive+Grasshopper+GoTo+Join.me) are all custom built. No Broadsoft to be found.

• Verizon is always a top SIP and UC provider as it goes to market with Cisco and BSFT.
• Comcast was a huge BSFT customer – yet they acquired Blueface this year to control their own destiny. 
• AT&T has both a Metaswitch and a Broadsoft and is a big Cisco shop, but goes to market with RingCentral for UCaaS.
• West (now called Intrado) is a Cisco shop. They just acquired OnSip (homebrew).
• Windstream is a mix of Mitel, Avaya, Allworx, Metaswitch, BSFT and Broadview (homebrew).
• Evolve IP is a BSFT shop with emphasis on Microsoft.

This top 10 list has been about the same for 8 years with little change except by virtue of M&A.

On-premise vendors chose homebrew:

• NEC chose Intermedia.
• Avaya and Alactel-Lucent chose RingCentral.

The point may be that pure play providers in either sector – CCC or UC – have a focus advantage as well as a devops convenience that non-pure play providers do not have. The feature game is over as almost every provider has the same features (they just appear different in the user interface).

Another buying factor is Price. Pricing is easier for non-BSFT shops, since BSFT means Gold, Silver, Bronze packaging that is impossible to get away from. With Vonage and to some extent 8×8 going the build-your-own-comms-system route, buyers can consume (and pay for) functionality that they need despite which layer it comes from – CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS.

Most service providers sell to everyone – even if their platform is a misfit for the buyer. It is all about revenue – any revenue. Where is the deep dive into their CRM that they pay big $$ for? Why have providers not examined what verticals that can be leveraged or integrations that can be strengthened to have a Unique Advantage. Pure CCC providers have done that kind of integration with Salesforce, Gamification, Payment Processing and more. The deep dive into the customer list may help your sales team focus their sales.

If you are selling UCaaS or CCaaS, follow the advice of Seth Godin: “Find products for your customers!” Not for your prospects – for your customers! Especially during a pandemic when wallet share and customer retention are your best avenues to go.

Employee experience is more important than customer experience. The employee spends as much time communicating internally as externally so their experience with software (tools for their job) is paramount. Clunky UX (user experience) for customer facing situations means unhappy customers (who call in and get frustrated by how long it takes to talk to a human that might not be able to help either!) This all costs you money.

Customer Experience is what companies try to achieve through Digital Transformation – or as I like to call it the Amazonization of the business. Every business wishes it had the ability to interact with customers in the frictionless and repeated manner of Amazon.

If the EX is great, the CX can be also. Ever on a call when the agent can’t get your records or some other piece of technology prevents a positive outcome (first call resolution)? That is why EX is more important than CX.

Unfortunately most software is built for F(x) – functionality. Broadsoft’s portal is a perfect example. Clunky, lacking in a user interface — might as well be a MS-DOS app.

Most cloud contact center software is built for the call centers. Reporting and analytics are designed for managers. What about the agent experience (EX)? The better that is the more efficient the center becomes.

I don’t know if it is a function of the product/tech or not, but most of UCaaS sells their offerings the same way. (Not much discovery; not much understanding of how the offering can accelerate digital transformation goals and get businesses to where they need to go.) Chatbot sales is the same way – like a guy selling pretzels on a NYC corner. “We got pretzels here! Get your pretzels here!” Contact Center is the same way – and directed at mostly one buyer: the call center manager. Without discovery, research and understanding, sales will be stymied and price pressured.

Functionality and features are great but that’s the engineering. Buyers don’t care if it is CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, WebRTC or what-have-you. They care about what it can do for them. Are you making it easier for employees to help customers? Are you making it easier for customers to self-serve? What does the offering provide for? What is the outcome? Not the price. The value.

NOTE: With WFH EX is the key. This pandemic isn’t over. We will likely see another one. WFH and EX are tied together. That’s the lesson from COVID. Digital Transformation (DT) was just getting started before COVID (as a marketing buzz word), but no one articulated what DT was. Now we know it is about customer self-serve and EX. Don’t miss that lesson!

So much hype around 5G without it really being deployed as anything different than 4G. 5G for the most part will run on new spectrum; hence, no phones in existence can pick up that 5G spectrum nor can these phones receive millimeter wave (unless they have a soft-radio that can be tweaked by PLR settings).

We are really seeing 4G LTE improvements like we did with 3G from 2.5G if anyone remembers that AT&T mess.

5G millimeter wave trials can’t go around corners since it is line of sight and effected by rain! Like satellite TV.

VZW is pushing fixed mobile again. They did it with Fixed LTE and now fixed 5G.

I think that the cellcos will spend big on 5G, but how much can they raise prices? The key is to pick up IoT customers to pay for the expanded network. I truthfully don’t know how this works out for the cellcos. Turn up thousands of small cells while prices are flat and going unlimited – but have to pay more tower leases and backhauls. They do make some of it up with SD-WAN back-up and added devices like iPads, security systems, and monitoring gear. I don’t have a bright outlook for telecom.

8×8 grew revenue and grew losses while decreasing the cost of sales and service delivery.

• AT&T debt is $179B;
• VZ debt is $109B;
• Comcast $107B;
• Spectrum at $80B

With what new services do they pay down that debt? Streaming TV?

FTR’s problem was like retail: highly leveraged to get declining assets (copper). Then service problems mounted and customers left. Boom! BK.

Windstream is the showcase of the ILEC problem: buy up assets, misuse said assets (like Allworx, Broadview, KDL, fiber, USF monies); pay financial roulette and miss. Boom! BK. They have no plan to exit BK and turn a profit. Frontier has that problem. CenturyLink is heavily reliant on business fiber sales without cellular or data center to make up for rural ILEC holdings, which was an issue for Windstream & FTR as well.

AT&T and Verizon are global (C-Link is too); have entertainment holdings (Yahoo/AOL and WB); own a large cellular business; Big Brand with equally large marketing spend; and no one ever got fired for buying either one.

MPLS losses are hurting all 3 (AT&T, VZ, CTL). SD-WAN dollars do not replace MPLS losses. Globally that hits revenue harder than it hits EBITDA since those global assets are largely Tier II circuits.

T-Mobile buying Sprint helps VZW and AT&T. Comcast and Spectrum are hurting VZW by taking away accounts that VZW has to move to wholesale, which might help EBITDA since support costs for wholesale is lower.

DISH buying Boost and now Ting Mobile may someday be a contender, but since Charlie Ergen couldn’t win with DISH + Sling… he won’t beat the Big 2 here either. Altice USA (formerly Cablevision, Optimum and Suddenlink) is partnered with Sprint for MVNO, so this merger will disrupt them some. Plus Altice walks around with its shoelaces tied together anyway.

This pandemic showcased the Digital Divide, racism, stupidity and so much more. It also highlighted how the ILECs have been grabbing USF monies for years without really delivering on promises. Several have pointed this out before to a gutless FCC but now it was glaringly ugly in the spotlight.

Zayo, GTT, Cogent, FiberLight and others had a chance until the pandemic moved most of the buying away from commercial properties. Yes, data center capacity will fill up and carriers will get some dollars on bandwidth there but will it be enough?

FirstLight is an example of a residential fiber provider in rural that has pieced together a sizable network. By pulling in rural healthcare and E-Rate money while landing anchor tenants for fiber builds, FirstLight is doing better than the ILEC (Consolidated (formerly Fairpoint) is the main ILEC they compete against in New England.

If the exodus from NFL cities is real and not temporary and work-from-home for 20-30% of the population remains beyond 2021, what does that mean for all of it? That wasn’t the network that anyone was really building for.

Truthfully 3Q 2020 financials will give a better picture than we have today. More of the bad money will have hit the spreadsheets, but watching RIFs (layoffs) at CTL and others foreshadows what is to come.