Many partners came out of MCI and C&W. The largest CLECs would recruit on college campuses. College students could be exposed to telecom.

Today, no CLECs. No college recruiting. Most students have never interfaced with a telco. How would they even consider telecom or the Channel?

Heck, most finance people don’t understand the channel. How would a college student or a recent grad know that they could start their own business in the Channel?

At CVX Expo, people were telling me that Enterprise sales reps at the carriers have entered the channel. And that might be the last people in.

When many partners started in the Channel, the pay was all upfront. Easy to start when you can sell something in the first month, get it installed in a month and get paid within 90 days. Today, a UCaaS deal averages 12 seats at $15 is $180. 5X SPIFF is $900 but it could take a while to get that. And that $36 commission is going to come monthly after billing.

Bridgepointe told me that they have a program to help eager potential partners start off.

As many partners age out/retire or take advantage of the M&A taking place in both Agency and MSPs, there is a need to replenish the IT/Telecom Channel with fresh blood.

The Street and other business media is writing about the cellular industry having an issue with churn.  Chrun is up at AT&T. AT&T blames it on seasonal as well as hardware upgrades, but also discounts ended for auto-pay subscribers and paperless.

I think that AT&T, VZW and T-Mo, respectively, thought that an MVNO – Cricket, Visible, Mint – would help them lower CAC (customer acquisition cost), churn and device subsidiary. They have seen Comcast and Spectrum kill it in wireless as an MVNO.

Comcast has 8.9M; Spectrum has almost 11M.  T-Mo has 140M. VZW has 146M. AT&T has 119M.

When all things become equivalent, it is a commodity – and consumers want the lowest price OR at least not to have fees added.

I personally don’t understand the “discount expired” bullshit. If you call and spend 20 minutes on the phone, you get the discount for another year. And we will do that dance every year ad nauseum.

This shows how little these telcos think about the consumers. Play with the levers to make the payers dance.

Wait until I can have my voice AI assist call all the places I have subscriptions: SiriusXM, Netflix, Hulu, Google Fi, YouTubeTV and more. And just have them call every month regularly to ask for a discount. Switch the automation on them.

What happens when every consumer has a shopping assistant to continually lower subscription fees and get better offers?

On the flip side, with the macro-economics and politics making a mess of the economy, what happens when millions are unemployed?  Do CEOs consider that the economy largely spins on consumer spending, so what happens there are too many unemployed?

So far this year, U.S. employers have announced 946,000 job cuts, the most since 2020. The number of managers at public companies dropped 6.1% from May 2022 to May 2025.  This graduating college class faces stark employment choices.

 

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!