Sales depends on Time Management. The better you are at managing your time and priorities, the more successful you will be.

Tom Peters says that your calendar knows what is most important to you. I say that your calendar reflects your sales. If you don’t have time blocked out for prospecting, follow up, networking, research and other aspects of the sales process, they may or may NOT get done. Time blocks help with focus and reminders.

Pre-pandemic, breakfast and lunch were great times to meet with clients and prospects. Now how do you replace that one on one time?

During this time, I have noticed myself (and others) having Zoom fatigue, lower motivation and general malaise that can sap the motivation. My calendar has blocks (now) for exercise. We bought a used elliptical from Play It Again Sports. I also get breaks in to move around as our 2 year old German Shepherd likes to play catch – and reminds me when it is time to.

What are you doing to stay positive?

How are you getting motivation? I miss being around people. I am using playing with our dog, music, and podcasts with the Greats (Jim Rohn, Seth Godin, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, et al). I have a large library of DVDs and CDs from all of them and many more including two CDs by Earl Nightingale: the Strangest Secret and Creative Thinking.

I have deleted my Facebook account. I found it a time suck and filled with negativity. Twitter can do that too, but twitter is a source for leads, news and connections for me. A timer has helped me to not get lost in the rabbit hole. Lists on twitter are helpful as well. LinkedIn is a twice a day, 15-minute interaction to check notifications, read some posts (to comment, like, share for interaction), and wish Happy Bday/congrats on people. I can be on LinkedIn longer if I am doing research for prospecting, which everyone in sales should be doing!

When do you write? Blog posts, guest article submissions, email copy, LinkedIn articles?

When do you read? Not social media posts but articles, books, magazines. Reading and writing keep the creativity brain churning.

Sales is about daily activity. Sales activity (especially RGA).

Resources for scheduling your sales day: From Salesforce, an example schedule from InsightSquared, and ways to structure your day. Productivity tips to tame the “squirrel brain“.

That’s what one analyst wrote: that UCaaS is on its way to taking half the PBX market. Seventeen years to approach 50%. How are they defining UCaaS? Does it include CPaaS or CCaaS? Are they still counting SIP trunk licenses as seats? Are remote call forwarding or just auto-attendant counted as a seat (like Grasshopper)? Are contact center seats counted as UC if it is sold by a UCaaS provider? Is a voice-activated Microsoft Teams seat counted?

In 2012, Synergy RG had this leaderboard: 8×8, Shoretel, RingCentral, Vocalocity, West IP, iCore, thinking phones and OTHER. Today, after all the M&A that would be 8×8, Mitel, RNG, Vonage, West IP, Cisco, fuze and Other.

In 2016, IHS (now Omdia by Informa) published this UCaaS leader-board: 8×8, Vonage, West, RingCentral, Mitel, Verizon, Star2Star, Broadview (now WIND), Fuze and Nextiva.

In 2020, IHS has essentially the same leader board: RingCentral, 8×8, Verizon, Mitel, Comcast, Vonage, LogMeIn, Star2Star, Nextiva, fuze. VZ absorbed XO and had a hit with OneTalk. LogMeIn is Jive plus Grasshopper & GoToMeeting. My question: where are these providers?

I get Avaya is legacy PBX but they have the deal with RNG and a cloud office offering.

AT&T and Spectrum are part of the Duopoly. Spectrum is a combo of Charter, TWC and Bright House — a lot of Broadsoft there. Also, cableco sell an awful lot of small business and residential voice! AT&T has a BSFT and a deal with RNG, but don’t make the cut?

Intermedia did the deal with NEC (which is similar to the RNG-Avaya deal less the $500M in cash). Intermedia also added Telax for CCC (cloud contact center) to round out the offering.

Lots of other contenders:

• Dialpad gets mentioned as a smart outsider.
• TelePacific acquired the BSFT shop DCSI and re-branded as TPX has a new owner, Siris.
• Evolve IP is a huge Microsoft shop with Broadsoft.
• Momentum?
• Coredial even has CCC now.
• Fusion is a messy mix of Cbeyond+Birch+Megapath – and just out of bankruptcy (the preferred business model of Birch).
• Not that I give a F but Windstream doesn’t get a mention due to BK?

Amazon and twilio both have conferencing and cloud contact center. Twilio is the biggest CPaaS shop with IVR and other functionality.

Cisco isn’t doing better than LogMeIn? Webex, Spark, Teams, Broadsoft, BroadCloud mixture? Or is Jive killing it despite all the turmoil over there?

Sangoma acquired FreePBX, Digium/Asterisk, VoIP Supply, VoIP Innovations and Dialogic. VoIP Supply white labels VoIP/UC. VoIP Innovations was a DID house with CPaaS and trunks. Digium wholesales HPBX.

I understand the Big 3+1 on the list: VON, RNG, 8×8, Nextiva. Mitel okay although I don’t think they did as well during the pandemic as others did. I think Avaya and Mitel lost users in 2020.

Fuze and West? Who even sees them in deals any more? Fuze spends most of its time trying to IPO or get acquired. West has a new owner and re-branded as Intrado, so how much UC business are they doing?

NOTE: “Based on Omdia’s criteria, neither Microsoft (for Teams), Cisco (for Webex), or Zoom, among many others, made the list, but are “ones to watch,”” Myers notes.

SIDE BAR: You know what company is having a great year in UC&C? Logitech. Logitech has partnered with Zoom for hardware as well as offers numerous WFH devices – microphones, headsets, cameras, keyboards, mice, speakers and more.

UCaaS has been pushing the rock up the proverbial hill for 17 years. Last year the market penetration of UCaaS was shy of 20%. Today, it is pushing 50%. It took a pandemic!!! Think about that. Many billions spent to build and launch IP Centrex, Hosted PBX, Hosted VoIP and then UCaaS – and the message was always wrong.

According to the Avant State of UCaaS report, the number reason to move to UCaaS is still that my PBX is tired. It isn’t that UCaaS is awesome.

Even with the pandemic, businesses are flocking to technology to remain in business, not because the technology is awesome. It is a need – a new need.

What did we learn? The story of Unified Communications was always off. Just look at the number of acronyms used over the years to tell you that the story was bad!

At CCA earlier this year, the new term they were going to use was Enterprise Collab in place of UCaaS. It turns out that most of the sweet sauce of UCaaS was actually the collaboration piece that failed to get mentioned in demos and pitches. Presence, chat, shared documents and conferencing (especially video).

Turns out two companies would win: Zoom and Microsoft (Teams). They ran away with it.

Despite Microsoft’s past failures with this product set (Lync, Sharepoint, OCS), it is winning with MS Teams. Why did MS Teams win? A recipe that includes price, features, familiarity, brand and number of certified people to install and support it. Who else has that? Not even Cisco.

Zoom – I can’t explain how they turned up 600K users in March and it took 8×8 ten years to hit that many. Granted, most are free, but price was never the point. There is a UCaaS provider right now selling seats for $5 per month. They will not reach 600K seats this year.

All of the UCaaS players have roughly the same feature set, so why did 8×8 and RingCentral beat Vonage, Nextiva and everyone else with sign-ups? (I say sign-ups because so much of this was free trials.) Likely brand recognition and execution. 8×8 has had its own service delivery problems, but I guess they can turn people up quickly. The less friction in that process, the better off you were. That was Zoom’s claim to fame: ease of use! (Gee, how many times have I said that on this blog?)

I’m not suggesting that Vonage, Nextive, Evolve IP, Intermedia and others didn’t get a bump from the pandemic. I suggest that the numbers will show that RNG and 8×8 had a bigger bump. [And Avaya and Mitel had a big loss.]

Now how much of this stays if we ever turn the corner on this pandemic remains to be seen. How many businesses survive also is up in the air.

Yesterday a VP at a CPaaS company asked me how to jump start sales.

That was a question that we asked in 2013 when I was working with Vidtel. There are a number of factors: Is the market ready? Are the partners receptive? Does the story resonate? It is about Timing.

Seven years after Vidtel, after raising almost $200M in VC dollars, Blue Jeans sold to Verizon. Zoom was only 2 years old in 2013.

The tech environment is better today than it was 7 years ago. Smartphones are more prolific. Laptops have webcams built-in (so do some TVs!). Wireless cameras are $100 and easy to install. Wi-fi is a given in every home and is better than it was 7 years ago in many cases. People are use to Facetime and other video apps (Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, twitch, YouTube). So much has changed in 7 years.

Getting Attention right now is hard. People are anxious and the environment is unstable. That said, the story is the thing. The story has to resonate with the buyer — and the story has to ignore the tech and highlight the outcome. (I have been saying this for ten years!)

CPaaS — who knows what it is? Who cares? You know what matters? What can it do for me? How easy is it to use? WIIFM!!!

UCaaS – it was never about the acronym! It was even less about the tech. TECH IS JUST A TOOL! It has always been about the outcome.

No one cares about the features. They care about what the features can do for them. Keep that in mind. During EC last year, the demos I attended just flipped around highlighting features. What a dumb way to demo. You demo to what the buyer needs; what other buyers have complimented; not on the newest shiny widget. Oh, well. That’s why it took 17 years and Microsoft won (75M daily users).

Ghost kitchens are all the rage. [Read it as Virtual Restaurant – there is a lot of it going around now due to the pandemic.] My buddy operates/owns/runs a bunch of restaurants in Tampa Bay. His take on Ghost Kitchens is that it misses the key ingredient to both owning a restaurant and dining – guest interaction!

“You can’t see a guest’s delight when they take their first bite or sip of something…”

When everyone says the new normal is remote working, I shake my head.

For an established business with a strong culture, virtual work can function. The example most give is Basecamp. Think about that: a software company that was built to be virtual with founders that understand remote work so well one wrote a book about it! That isn’t the average executive.

This reminds me of cloud servers. Everyone thinks you just slam that server into a data center and the application is in the cloud! That isn’t really how most migrations work, but I don’t want to digress. too much.

There is more to an office and an organization than the org chart and the real estate. The interactions, the celebrations, the non-visual clues and so much more happen under the roof. It is only by intention that a manager could possibly help bake that virtually.

People under-estimate how much a culture is the glue of an organization. Does anyone know what the vision and mission of their company is? I’ll wait.

Waiting…

A Ghost Office will need a strong culture, mission and vision. It will necessitate good management and well defined role expectations. How wonderful was your last performance review?

It is these intangible factors that will be necessary for remote work to work. It isn’t as simple as hitting tasks unless the strategy is clear and broken down to tasks/goals that are well managed.

A software company (Basecamp) with less than 60 employees that is task driven is probably not the company you work for.

The cloud industry would love it if FINALLY they hit pay dirt and everyone was remote, but that isn’t going to work for (in my estimation) more than half the companies and more than two-thirds of employees.

On a Zoom Coffee Break with COLOTRAQ yesterday, the discussion centered around our face to face world in the channel. Will conferences happen? Will people go?

CONFERENCES

Many conferences have suitcasing clauses. Why? Because a majority of the value is in meetings and networking, both items that conferences have a hard time monetizing and facilitating. ITW went virtual this year. The platform chosen was essentially a Deal Center portal to facilitate meetings. Some have expressed to me that it was not a fun experience. So again the virtual experience is not user friendly.

INCOMPAS, ITW, Metro Connect, ITEXPO and Channel Partners Expo rely heavily on inter-personal interaction. Without that what do you get at these events?

Conferences are experiences. It is about seeing old friends, meeting peers (new and old), doing business and learning. Currently, there isn’t a platform available that can replicate that online.

The business model of conferences has been about the vendors providing about 90 percent of the revenue via booths and sponsorship. Everything else is an after thought. Everything else was just to attract attendees to walk the show floor – to provide value to the show’s vendors (the real customer of the show).

Now turn it is all virtual. The platforms are basically portals and Zoom webinars. What do you do?

Content becomes king again.

An in-person event costs roughly $1500 per show for the partner with airfare, hotel and F&B. A partner has to find $3000 worth of value out of every show. Think of it this way: What can an attendee learn at the show that could be applied to create $3000 in revenue?

This will be the new thinking until we have herd immunity or a vaccine. What is the ROI of a show?

Now conference companies – like Informa, TMC, et al – should be re-thinking what a conference looks like. Most of these companies already sell webinars. In other words, again and again they demonstrate what they consider content and how it is produced.

Most of the webinars I have seen consist of analysts and vendor executives yakking. People have become oblivious to basic marketing guidelines. Who is the customer? What do they care about? What do I want the attendee to take-away from this?

Instead it is basically wrapping for the vendor. I have yet to see webinars starring partners or customers discussing outcomes. (I would fall over if I did.)

On the Coffee Break, I mentioned that the key will be content that is engaging and entertaining. No more reading slides or showing videos. On webinars this week, there wasn’t enough value to make up for the time wasted. And for each shitty webinar, it becomes harder to get someone to watch YOUR webinar since the experience thus far has been disappointing.

COLOTRAQ CEO, Dany Bouchedid, thought that building a community would be the next step for conferences. Vendors would pay to be a part of the community in order to interact with the partners. Sounds like a vertical LinkedIn, right? InMail by Informa. (BTW, when it was Virgo, CP was contemplating a subscription model.)

ASCII Group and Robin Robins have that model in a way. The shows are a profit center that provide real world value to the attendees – and a funnel for the communities the shows’ owners operate.

The conference companies will need to become TV channels of quality programming. It will be available in audio and video – probably with commercials. It will be on Facebook Live, a YouTube channel and more. Since it isn’t easy to produce quality content (just browse cable TV or YouTube to see what I mean), it will become bland fast. Only Mr Rogers and Sesame Street understand how to produce quality educational programming!