Windstream’s stock has been under $2 for a month now. It may go as low as $1 according to a few speculators. On top of that, they are sitting on $6 Billion in debt with less than $6 Billion in revenue.

They have to spend some CAPEX to upgrade broadband in RLEC region. They lost money on data centers when they sold it off to Tierpoint. They wasted dollars on IPTV; and are now re-selling AT&T DirecTV. Dividends require free cash flow.

What move does the C-Suite make? A re-brand.

The Cloud & Connectivity Unit becomes Windstream Enterprise & Wholesale, combining all Enterprise, Wholesale and CLEC/SMB business units. The C-Suite is going all in on SD-WAN, fiber and UCaaS. The hope is that the old CLEC operations will win the day. The RLEC is basically a drain. They don’t think they can move the needle against cable and 5G.

None of the factors externally changed. They still have to win business against their rivals: Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T and Verizon.

In the UCaaS space, there are at least 9 companies performing better — and most of them lose money! How does WIND outperform in UC against companies willing to lose money in the near term?

In the SD-WAN race, they are now the early bird in a sea of providers. That will hurt their margins.

For them to win business, what is the new story now?

All this is lipstick. It is a new logo. Big deal. Brand without Culture is a failure. Re-naming the division you are betting your business on without a culture change won’t work. Your Culture is Your Brand.

There were problems with service delivery; and profit on services sold. The mentality of any revenue is good revenue is a telecom fable. I just don’t think anything internally changed at WIND except the logo (shirts).

Tom Peters writes, “Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy.”

In 2018, while CenturyLink gets indigestion integrating Level3;
while GTT only looks at the revenue goal, overlooking the customers;
while AT&T fights the DOJ for TW; and while Verizon figures out what else besides 5G will make it enough money to prop up its business, there is OPPORTUNITY aplenty.

NITEL, AireSpring, TPX, CBB, PowerNet and other mid-sized (former CLECs) providers have an opportunity to step into the channel space that is available and grab market share.

Service Delivery is the most critical aspect of that.

Where can you step into the market and deliver service in a better than average way? (Where can you suck less?)

It’s going to be in the 10 employee to 199 employee space where most of the opportunity is. Even more in the 20-99 segment. Focus on that.

In the sales process for UCaaS, if the sale gets hung up on the hardware, it is your fault!

It is due to a poor job in discovery.

The difference between selling dial-tone and selling Unified Communications is uncovering the WHY. What pain are they solving with your UC platform?

What pain does UCaaS Solve? I asked that HERE in 2016. The painful lesson is that most salespeople suck at selling cloud. Telecom is all about replacement order taking. In other words, “Oh, you have a T1, here’s a 10MB cable modem or some DIA. You have POTS, here’s some VoIP. It’s cheaper!” That is what passes for sales in telecom.

In selling cloud, you have to uncover what they are trying to do.

Salesforce is a far cry from ACT! Google G Suite is very different from MS Office 2003. Uber disrupted the taxi industry. That is the Cloud Effect!

So if the business isn’t being disrupted by buying your UC suite, then you are simply selling them dial-tone. You might as well sell them CPaaS! Because that is what they bought.

Sales triggers for UCaaS go beyond the PBX is broken. It has to talk about business process pain – where can we improve the business process. Maybe take away some swivel chair with SaaS Integration. That is selling productivity and efficiency – maybe even BPI.

Do they need analytics? Do they need some transparency into calls or employee activity?

Do they need a unified inbox? Then we are looking at cloud contact center.

If you are still talking about which phone they want, you missed the whole point.