With Retail in a steady decline (see Retail Apocalypse), everyone blames Amazon. That really isn’t the case.

One thing Google and Amazon do is try things. They fail. A lot. But keep trying things. Most companies fear failure so don’t try things.

Retailers have not realized that in e-commerce sales friction is a problem. A big problem. Amazon is the gold standard of frictionless buying as well as frictionless delivery. Execution and Customer Experience are key components of that.

This past weekend we tried to buy a Samsung TV from target.com. It was clunky on mobile to the point I had to pull out the laptop. Changing store locations on mobile (tablet or phone) was hard. Get through the order process, pick up will be in 2 hours. Good thing I checked my email before heading out because the order was cancelled due to lack of inventory! No text (despite having my cell number to confirm the account!)

Then I don’t get my money back for 5 days! WTH Target?

Early on, Target used Amazon for e-commerce. Now they have their own site. Apparently, there is a lag between order placement and when the order is picked. In 10 years on Amazon, I think this happened once. This has happened twice with other stores.

Walmart has a clunky website too. Despite buying jet.com for $3.3B in 2016, Walmart dot com has not caught up to the frictionless experience of Amazon. Management treats them as 2 separate entities. I imagine that Walmart wants the foot traffic of in-store pick-up. This would be smart except that the in-store experience is hurry-up-and-wait.

So I trek over to Walmart to pick up a similar TV. The TVs are security tagged together. I have to find someone to unlock it. Then wait in line to pay for it. The register is broken (there was even on a note on the register saying this on the screen that the cashier ignored.) Wait some more. Finally pay for it. Then I can’t find a route out of the store. The route I chose was one-way and the alarm went off.

Walmart gets a lot of shoplifting – about $2B worth per year – but on the occasion that I shop there, I notice that they treat everyone like a thief. The CX (customer experience) is lacking because they want to reduce labor costs and push a self-serve model. I dislike self check-out. Something often goes wrong. Plus not having staff walking around means more opportunity for theft and that customers can’t get help (so lost sales too).

Retail is a lot like newspapers in so many ways. First newspapers railed about Craigslist for taking all the profits. Then they railed at Google. In all of that time, they never even attempted to change their business/financial model.

Retail has spent years yelling about Amazon, but that isn’t why malls are empty and foot traffic is down. It is a combination of the customer experience and the buyers. Ron Johnson’s lessons at JCPenneys were lost on many in retail. Buyers today want frictionless, inventory in stock and some kind of experience. Have you ever shopped at Mens Wearhouse? That is an experience.

Whenever I hear complaints about the monopoly – Amazon, Google, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon – I realize that the business owner or executive just wants easy. They want masses built on low price, which isn’t realistic. There are riches in niches that fill the holes of the blind spots and weaknesses of the monopolies. Expose those. Leverage those. But remember two things: it is about customer experience and execution.

I am currently working on my new book, The ABCs of Channel Programs: Channel Sales Enablement. To help me flush out some content for the book, I decided to talk with some friends in the industry about what hurdles they see in the channel right now.

Today’s podcast is with channel advocate, Nancy Ridge, founder of Ridge Innovative; co-founder of Alliance of Channel Women; and former board member of TCA. Nancy and I talk about the changes in the channel over the last few years. Give it a listen.

Windstream is in Bankruptcy. The bankruptcy was triggered by a lawsuit over a leaseback with UNITI that broke the loan covenant that Aurelius identified and leveraged.

Now Windstream is heading to court with UNITI over the lease. What happens if the court finds that the lease was not a lease, but was in fact financing? Does that mean that the leaseback clause that Aurelius won with is void? Will that ruling then be appealed?

This thing gets more convoluted every day.

If the lease with UNITI stands, Windstream gets liquidated.

If WIND gets liquidated, UNITI will have to file BK too since 60% of its revenue is from Windstream.

That leaves a huge hole in telecom with ripple effects to many carriers (who buy from UNITI or WIND) and customers of Windstream and all the carriers that UNITI acquired (Hunt, PEG, TowerCloud, Southern Light, Bluebird and others).

Everyone wants to blame Aurelius for this, but the REIT spin-off of UNITI (then called CS&L in 2014) was a way for Windstream to stay ahead of its debt. Windstream Holdings sits on $5.8B in debt (100x its market cap). UNITI sits on $5B in debt (5x market cap). With revenue declining this quarter for WIND, it is hard to see how they pay off the debt that primarily matures in 2020.

The executives are waiting on $20M in bonuses but with revenue declining, are they still entitled to it? When do the execs head for the exits?

This is the problem with getting bigger via an LBO strategy. (LBO stands for leveraged buy-out, whereby a PE firm takes a company private like say Avaya and then gets buried by the debt. It is 1980s style business.) AT&T and Verizon are sitting on ridiculous debt – over $100B each. How sustainable is that in flat markets with declining consumer buying power?

Of my meetings this week 80% were on Zoom Meeting, 10% on GoTo and 10% on other. Zoom is winning the war on conferencing that everyone thought GoToMeeting (a LogMeIn company) had won. Just three years ago, 80% of my meetings were Join.me and GoTo.

LogMeIn grew through acquisitions, including LastPass in 2015. “In 2017, LogMeIn completed a merger with GetGo, the spin-off of the GoTo product line from Citrix (according to Wikipedia). Last year, LogMeIn purchased UC provider Jive for over $300M. If you follow the Cisco playbook (Broadsoft and Webex), this should have kinda sorta worked. It didn’t. Why?

A few reasons this didn’t work.

One, the launch or re-launch was uneventful – or as Seth Godin says was not remarkable. No one remarked on it. There was some buzz around the lower pricing but not enough to make a dent.

Two, at conferences, the GoTo people aren’t certain – or excited – about their own product offering. Launching or re-branding or re-launching requires internal buy-in and enthusiasm, because sales is about emotion. You transfer that emotion to the buyer (or partner). Clear, concise and repeated internal communications are necessary for a successful product launch.

Three, not enough partner mind-share. Webex and Teams have tens of thousands of partners certified in Cisco and Microsoft, respectively. Those partners have a business model wrapped around the vendor. There are still numerous partners who are not brand evangelists for either one. Find them Recruit them!

This is a time when free conferencing is declining amid the loss of revenue from inter-carrier compensation for the platform providers. Paid conferencing should be booming — but it should also be better!

How in 2019 does it not recognize my phone number and place me in the meeting? UberConference by Dialpad can do this (that product has a number of other UX issues that are making it hard to use but they have that one feature right.)

GoToMeeting has not really added any functionality. Add in easy to use scheduling, recording, transcription and some analytics which are becoming common place (Google AI?) and maybe start making in-roads against Zoom and Microsoft. BTW, I have no idea how Jive fits into the GoTo product or if it is stand-alone.

LogMeIn may be focused on other silos, but it looks like it spent $300M and lost its focus on the collab space. It has become Xerox in that regard. Xerox had PARC Labs and all the new technology but just couldn’t figure out what to do with it (or how to capitalize on it).

LogMeIn made 2 Gartner MQ: Challenger in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide; and Leader in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions. They had market share. they have cool domain names like jive.com, join.me and goto.com. There is much to work with here to get back in the race.

LogMeIn has a host of other products including a specialty in remote support and endpoint management. There are ways to bundle to win.

They integrate with G+ Suite, Slack, Hipchat and Trello, which could be a place to start, since none of those apps have conferencing.

I am currently working on my new book, The ABCs of Channel Programs: Channel Sales Enablement. To help me flush out some content for the book, I decided to talk with some friends in the industry about what hurdles they see in the channel right now.

Today’s podcast is with long time friend in the channel, Peter Davis, who is currently Regional Sales Director at PanTerra Networks. (You can find him on twitter as @dotcomguy.

We discuss executive buy-in as well as the struggles of selling UCaaS today including SPIFFs and MDFs and more. Give it a listen and let me know your thoughts at peter (at) rad-info.net