Are your sales not where they should be?  Do you even know where they should be?

Do you have a sales system in place?

Have you invested in your team with product knowledge and sales skills?

What are your sales meetings like?

It begins with Strategy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is your ICP? Who is your target customer? If you say Everyone, that is problem number 1. With a target, marketing can do a better job at Lead Gen. The story becomes clearer. The outcomes speak to the specific target, which attracts more leads.

Most prospects have too many choices. There are over 2000 providers of UCaaS in North America. There are 62K MSPs. There are hundreds of CyberSec/MSSPs. There are already thousands of Agentic AI companies. Your sales people have to be Trusted Advisors or at least experts at something.

Use cases are proof. They provide reassurance to the Prospect that you have helped their kind of business before with a good outcome.

Selling into Verticals means the sales team knows the lingo. They can talk Inside baseball.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What CRM are you using and why? Is the CRM there for your sales team or your management? If you are using Salesforce or worse some customer CRM project, it might be too complicated for your team to use. CRM is for the sales team to collect data. The next evolution of CRM with Conversational, where AI will insert every customer interaction – SMS, chat, email, voice, video – will be saved as a vCon and transcribed into the customer record. There are BPOs right now doing that and using that data to improve the sales interactions, teach the sales team and increase sales.

Doing this provides for the full Voice of the Customer. It gives AI data that is searchable and easy to use.

Most companies have a CRM that is for management. It doesn’t serve the sales team, so the data never gets in there. The whole point is to get the data in the CRM.

That is just one part of the system.

The sales system consists of an ICP, the Value Proposition, use cases, sales training and product training coupled with a helpful CRM – and in 2025 a dash of AI.

The Value Prop: What is your super power? What outcomes do your customer achieve? Every employee should have a similar answer.

Are you using AI?  You are likely using Otter, Read, or some other note-taker. What are you doing with those notes? Is anyone learning from them? Are they dumped into the CRM or a database for AI to access them to learn from?

The notes will tell you if your sales rep is talking more or less than the prospect. Hint: they should be talking LESS. Asking good open ended questions and Listening for pain points and business objectives.

The notes will tell you what questions are being asked. Better Questions, Better Answers, Better Sales.

Like AI, the better the prompt the more useful the output from AI. The lazy prompt gets garbage.

What about your team members? Do you have hunters or farmers? Are they motivated for big wins or transactions? Most sales people are more farmer than hunter and transactional. Being task oriented means chasing small business and getting small wins often. The guy that sells airplanes cannot sell key system replacement.

Telecom sales has traditional been pushing products – usually replacement products for less money – to small businesses. Very transactional.

Now the Save You Money pitch falls on deaf ears. Save You Time. Solve Pain. This is what Buyers want to hear about.

The market has an average size of 12 employees per SMB in the US. SMB is 99.9% of the business.

85% of the 62K MSPs in the US and Canada have less than 10 employees and have revenues below $5M. They also generally do not have a dedicated sales person. The owner is the sales rep. They sell to other small businesses.

60% of sales reps in the US do not meet Quota.

Who set Quota? How did they set Quota?

What is your average sales cycle?

What is your average sales size?

Ask your CRM or your AI.

If your sales cycle is 6 months or more and your sales reps get a 3 month ramp, everyone is set up for failure. It takes 60-90 days just to learn the products, the system, the use cases, the Value Prop, the ICP. In my experience, sales reps rarely learn any of this in training or on-boarding. Dare I say that most on-boarding is with HR and setting up your email, phone, laptop and CRM. Then off to the races with you.

Are you Coaching your sales team?

Are you doing sales forensics?

Maybe you should give me a call so I can help.  (813) 963-5884

This was borrowed from a LinkedIn post.

Yesterday I had a call with a VP of Enablement. And what she shared, blew my mind.

“We fed Ai our top rep’s calls,” she said.
“What we discovered changed everything.”

I had to know more.

Her company: 400+ rep SaaS org
The problem: Only 3 reps consistently hit 150%+ of quota
The question: What makes them different?

So they ran an experiment.

Fed 6 months of call recordings into Ai.
Top 3 performers vs everyone else.
“Find the patterns,” they told it.

45 minutes later, her entire enablement strategy was in the trash.

Here’s what they discovered:

Discovery #1: Top reps talk 28% LESS

Average rep: 64% talk time
Top performers: 36% talk time

But when they do speak? Surgical precision.

Discovery #2: They “lose” more deals

Top reps disqualify 41% of opportunities in discovery.
Average reps disqualify 12%.

Her reaction: “We’ve been teaching reps to save every deal. Our best reps are doing the opposite.”

Close rates tell the story:
Top reps: 68%
Everyone else: 24%

Discovery #3: The 17-minute rule

No top performer mentions product features before minute 17.
Not once in 6 months of calls.

Instead, they talk about:

– The prospect’s competition (38% of discovery)
– Industry disruptions (29%)
– Personal career goals (21%)
– Team dynamics (12%)

“We train feature-benefit from day one,” she told me.
“Our best reps ignore it completely.”

Discovery #4: They use one phrase repeatedly: “The best companies in your space are…”

Appears 4.2 times per call for top reps.
0.3 times for everyone else.

Always followed by strategic silence.
Prospect fills the gap every time.

Discovery #5: Their follow-up is backwards

Average rep: “Here’s what we discussed”
Top rep: “Here’s what your competitor just announced”

Top reps lead with market intelligence.
Never with meeting recaps.

She showed me what happened next:

They rebuilt everything.

Scrapped their 40-slide onboarding deck.
Threw out their talk tracks.
Redesigned training from scratch.

New approach:

Week 1: Master strategic silence
Week 2: Practice disqualification
Week 3: Industry intelligence training
Week 4: Competitive positioning

No product training until week 5.

But here’s what really got me—

“The hardest part wasn’t changing the training,” she said.
“It was convincing leadership that everything we believed was wrong.”

Her parting words:

“If you’re not using AI to audit your top performers, you’re training your team to be average.”

She’s right.

CSOs, here’s your assignment:

Pick your top rep.
Feed their calls to AI.
Prepare to be shocked.

 

Best way to feed AI conversations is via the vCon. The vCon is the standard that the IETF is discussing for virtual conversation file format. Voice, text, email, social media, video conversations all sit in different silos. Most call centers have a problem with these multi-channel conversations. Recently, there is a solution for that that BPOs are excited to deploy because they understand that if they can collect the whole customer or prospect conversation across every channel and feed it into a Conversational CRM and into AI, they can improve the KPIs of their call center. They can train their people better. They can coach them up. AI can assist to make their people more productive. Case studies are coming, but I’d be happy to discuss how we can feed all your calls into AI to get the proper insights for management and your team!  RAD-INFO INC 813-963-5884

Just a quick rant. Every time a TSD signs up a vendor, I get mass blasted from the vendor. I have a number of problems with it:

(1) a majority of the vendors, I just don’t care about and never will.

(2) a majority of vendors SUCK at email marketing!

(3) many of the vendors are looking for MSPs and are sending to Agents.

(4) I get enough spam.

You can tell this is templated and maybe AI-driven email dribble.  One week apart. Both emails are just interruptions.

If they had their AI look at any of my websites, they would know that I have nothing to do with cybersec and never have. My referral partners do! But do research before you cold call? NEVER! Use AI to research the partner? NEVER! We use AI to spam faster.  It is Lazy. And if you are Lazy at marketing, you are probably lazy at a lot of things. I don’t work with lazy vendors.  I get enough of that from the Brand name telcos, I don’t have to use a lazy vendor for anything. There are just too many options for MDR, UCaaS, CCaaS, CX, AI, and every other acronym we are pushing this week.

The sender isn’t even certain which TSB I work with!!!

From:  @esentire.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2025 9:29 AM
To: peter@
Subject: Re: eSentire Cybersecurity Partnership

PETER,

Just wanted to bring my previous message to your attention in case you missed it.

eSentire offers multiple partnership options, whether as a reseller, referral partner, MSP/MSSP, or through our distribution and TSB partners (Avant, Telarus, Intelysis, AppDirect). Our program is flexible with no tiers or minimums—just rewards for working with us.

We can help you confidently discuss cybersecurity with your clients and create a new predictable revenue stream.

Hoping we can set up a call to discuss your goals and share best practices for selling cybersecurity.

Best,

SDR Dude

Partnership Development Manager

From:  @esentire.com>
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2025 3:44:26 PM
To: peter
Subject: eSentire Cybersecurity Partnership

Hi PETER,

I wanted to personally introduce myself—I’m SDR, the Partner Development Manager at eSentire. My focus is building relationships with partners like yourself to help scale your pipeline, increase revenue, and keep your customers protected from ever-evolving cyber threats.

I’d love to set up a quick call to learn more about your business and explore how we can collaborate and potentially enhance your cybersecurity offerings.

If you’re interested, let me know a day and time that works best for you.

Thank you,

Partnership Development Manager

eSentire Inc. – The Authority in Managed Detection and Response

The best emails describe exactly who your ICP is and how you benefit them. Or use a quote from a partner.  But to use AI to interrupt my day once a week is annoying!

As we head into the second half of expo season, new channel execs popping up everywhere.  #musicalchairs

Fusion Connect has yet another Channel Chief.  This is like 3 in 4 years. Broadvoice has a new Channel head. Many companies have hired a new partner VP, alliance chief or channel lead.

For private equity owned companies like Fusion Connect, there is a very short runway for channel leaders. Why? PE doesn’t really understand the channel. I am on plenty of calls with bankers and private equity and most have little understanding about the indirect channel. [They should read my new book.]

It takes 3 years to join a company, design a strategy, put chess pieces in place and execute on a plan.

Put it another way: if the average sales cycle is 6 months, how can any sales leader expect results in a year? It takes time to build a pipeline. Learning the products, the company, the ICP, the Value Prop — all this takes time because most companies don’t on-board well or have these training on these important elements.

When a provider has a revolving door in the channel sales team, Partners will run away. It signals instability and perhaps no faith in the channel. That is a big red warning light.

Right now, with the macro-economics, the global turmoil, AI hype, M&A, and so many other factors that are churning the channel waters, it is hard to blame the channel chief, but so many do.

The channel execs don’t get to choose product, deem the value prop, tweak operations, or slap the billing department for their “errors”. All of that however comes into play on if a partner wants to sell your stuff or not.

Many people think the channel is coin-operated. Why they don’t think the same way about the direct sales team, but that’s another blog post. It may be coin-operated, but there are many choices out there for every product line.  A large SPIFF isn’t always going to make up for poor service delivery, bad product-market fit, or erroneous billing. A large SPIFF will get the attention of the channel. Partners that don’t know better will sell your stuff once for that SPIFF, but just once. That SPIFF will get you a shot; your org has to make the customer happy to make that investment in the partner worthwhile.

CMO and Channel Chief have the shortest life span at a company right now. In both cases, the execs – CMO and CC – have to put lipstick on a pig, usually with a limited budget, so they have to get Maybelline instead of Clinique. If your org is plowing through C-suite, time to bring in a management consultant who will tell you what the real problems are – if you want to hear it.  Don’t think partners don’t already know.

One lesson that is fresh: take a great provider, loved by the channel that had a very specific target customer and was doing great. Then that provider gets acquired. Slowly, the secret sauce that made the provider beloved is baked off, resulting in customer AND partner churn.

A reputation takes years to build, and seconds to ruin.

If you are a channel chief and are looking to have dinner with your peers at the CVX Expo 2025 in Phoenix, drop me a note!

 

Right now there are a number of factors surrounding voice. The Metaswitch acquisition by Alianza, the second time that Metaswitch has been sold. The bankruptcies of Mitel and Avaya. The disappearance of NEC from UC. The neglect of Broadworks as Webex Calling is pushed. BEAD money. Broadband dominance.

For softswitches providers have a few choices: Crexendo/Netsapiens; 2600Hz; homebrew with Freeswitch (Sangoma); 3CX; Ribbon; Alianza; Intermedia; and I don’t think they can buy Metaswitch or Broadworks. They would have to buy a CSP using it or third party it. If you don’t want your softswitch vendor to also be a competitor you are limited.

If you still sell copper like many of the 700+ mom-and-pop RLECs do, you really have a problem. No one makes a switch for that.

Metaswitch will move to the cloud and won’t enable GR303 anymore. Alianza has a huge payroll and at least $100M in debt from buying Metaswitch. They are betting big, but I assume after Navigate25 there will be layoffs as the ship starts to right-size.

With the BEAD and broadband push, ISPs and their PE owners don’t want complex voice offerings. They want simple voice. That is available from every CPaaS provider, any softswitch, even the SBC vendors. Being able to offer SIP trunks is easy. Choosing a vendor is tough because there are so many choices. And not much good data on the vendors. Many of the vendors – like Sinch and Infobip – are like Lumen, a collection of mergers. Sinch owns ANPI and still runs that BroadWorks!

UCaaS has single digit CAGR for many reasons: confusion; lack of a market fit; lack of verticalization; noise; poor service delivery; lousy user adoption; and stale sales people.  We went from pushing UC&C to UC+CC to UC+CC+AI. The buyers have not caught up yet.

Also, much of the product development is for Enterprise, a market largely owned by Microsoft. That is 0.1% of the market. 99.9% of the market consists of small business. They usually buy Voice. Very small business uses a workforce platform like the HVAC, flooring, repair techs who often visit my house. Text, call, quote, invoice, pay – all through one app that works on a hardened tablet or cell phone. What do they need 8×8 for?

Well, for Direct Routing is what they need 8×8 for. With almost 400M desktops using MS Teams, we are full circle back to selling minutes. Dial-tone and SMS enablement through a variety of means, but a price compressing offering nonetheless.

8×8 used to be a patent house. Now it is celebrating being a SIP provider. You take the revenue the ay it comes, but this isn’t a long term play.

This is what is happening: offerings are created for Enterprise and vertical offerings are being created for small business. It will create big problems for UCaaS providers.

Also, the Buyers are changing. How many Mobile UC offerings are there? Maybe 2. VZW OneTalk for one. Everyone has an app but that doesn’t mean it is mobile UC.

AI is great but it requires data. Small businesses don’t have data so the AI has no food to work with. And small business isn’t going to pay $20K for a data scientist to extract that data.

And the hype around AI makes Buyers worry. They don’t want to make a bad decision. They don’t want vaporware. They don’t want to be the early adopter/guinea pig. and again only bigger businesses re the target of all this AI PR.

We also have big companies laying off like crazy. Those $1M TCV deals will never reap $1M.

There are so many factors at work that running a UCaaS provider or a softswitch/white-label is a huge challenge today.

It’s like they are doing product dev work without customer input. If you are Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, sure, but the rest of the crowd should probably get some feedback.