On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 16 of 376

Desk Phones and Other Legacy Services

“The deskphone market has been left for dead by many but there is still room in the space for the device to evolve and become become a more integral part of your UC strategy,” writes TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani. The thing is: they will need to change drastically to do that. It is still pretty much the same device that we had 20 years ago. It is still the equivalent to the original brick of a cell phone.

With less than 25% of businesses on VoIP according to TechNova Consulting, then there is still time to make them relevant again.

Meanwhile Verizon is asking the FCC for permission to shutter more legacy SS7 voice switches. The TDM to IP transition is marching on. Frame Relay and ATM are mothballed. Soon SS7 as we are used to will be. I wonder if 9-1-1 centers have caught up yet?

AT&T told the FCC that “AT&T is progressing with its TDM-to-IP voice service transition in two cities in Florida and Alabama, telling the FCC that on a combined basis 50% of total customer accounts have voluntarily migrated to one of the telco’s next-gen wireline and wireless voice services.” [source]

OTT communications is growing so wide that it is now being reported on by analysts! “The VoIP market (e.g., Microsoft Skype), the IP messaging market (e.g., WhatsApp), a portion of the social networking advertising market (e.g., Facebook), Unified Communications (e.g., Cisco) and Cloud communications markets (e.g., Twillio) make up the OTT communication market.” [source]

Broadsoft has 38% of the global UC market with 15 million UC lines, but that isn’t a significant portion of the global business voice market. The analysts have now estimated CAGR in UCaaS at just 10% (down from the 20+% they were cheerleading for a few years ago).

Riddle me this: If the IP transition is going so well, how is the growth so slow (<10%) and the market penetration so small (15M = 38% or <25% of biz) when there are so many VoIP Providers out there?

Tags: att, broadsoft, fcc, ott, tdm, UC, voip, vz
Related tags: market, still, voice, transition, communications

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UCaaS: It isn’t All Bad News – Aug 25, 2016

News Tidbits Part 2919 – Jul 30, 2015

Promises Unkept – Jul 12, 2015

Verizon Invites the Channel Once More – Mar 20, 2015

Some More Studies and Stats – Mar 10, 2015

At the FCC – Feb 24, 2015

The RBOCs: Copper, Spectrum, Regulation and Sales – Feb 03, 2015

Too Much Going On – Aug 04, 2011

UCaaS Round-Up (Tidbits 2443) – Nov 16, 2016

Marketing Lesson from the Election – Nov 09, 2016

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January 24, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Customer Segmentation

“Most businesses, whether B2B or B2C, don’t cater to just one type of customer, even if they do only sell one product or service,” writes Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot.

The same messaging to VSB, small and medium business just won’t work, especially for UCaaS. The pain points are different. The buyer persona are different. As I have said before: when you say you sell into the 1-500 or 1-1000 employee space, that is several segments of the market.

Seth Godin has an excellent short post about Almost No One buys from you. There are 27 million businesses in the US. If you have 10K business customers, that is 0.037% of the market — or almost no one.

So when you say “I sell to everyone”, you are fooling yourself. You have customers. Profile them. Duplicate them. Engage them.

“We think we’re designing and selling to everyone, but that doesn’t match reality. It makes no sense at all to dumb down your best work to appeal to the longtime bystander …” [or the critic or the shopper than doesn’t want any of your features or who wants to pay as little as possible]

It isn’t about a scatter shot approach to sales and marketing. It is about being an archer or a sniper.

Fiber network operators and fixed wireless providers know this better than other service providers because you can’t sell what the fiber or tower don’t touch. However, it is a lesson that CLECs never wanted to learn.

Tags: fiber, marketing, sales, sellecom, selling
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What Can You Learn from Target? – Mar 10, 2015

Are You a Red or Black Ant? – Aug 28, 2014

Doubling Your Sales – Aug 29, 2013

Is Cold Calling Dead? – Jan 28, 2013

What You Can Learn From Romney’s Campaign – Nov 20, 2012

You Can’t Win on Price – Jul 24, 2012

Sales is Not Marketing – Oct 02, 2011

What Can You Learn from Pharma Sales? – Dec 29, 2016

Sales KPIs – Nov 23, 2016

The Pressure of Price – Oct 17, 2016

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January 24, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

What Do Buyers Want?

I have written about retails troubles before, but this KPMG global survey asks 18,430 consumers about their most recent online shopping experiences.

“Today’s consumer no longer goes shopping, but is shopping, all the time and everywhere. And in a truly global online marketplace, competition is no longer limited to local shops during regular business hours. Consumers can easily buy from retailers and manufacturers located anywhere in the world – or from those with no physical retail locations at all,” comments Willy Kruh, Global Chair, Consumer Markets, KPMG International.[KPMG]

That means the competition is blood red. It is leaving bodies in the road (American Apparel, Sports Authority, etc).

It also means that buyers are always shopping for your stuff too! Retail buying habits bleed into what we do – B2B selling.

Key point from KPMG: “Excellent customer support was the number one loyalty-earning attribute, cited by 65 percent of the respondents.”

A key point from a phone call today: “Who is taking care of the customer experience?” If you are in UCaaS, who is managing the user experience? Who is making certain that the users can access softphones and that they work? Who is training and re-training on system features and functionality?

From the time the contract is inked, the real work begins. In that sense it isn’t a retail experience, where free shipping or 1-click shopping are priorities. Implementation, deployment, training and user experience. Who’s doing that well?

Tags: customer service, hosted pbx, retail, UC, UX, voip
Related tags: shopping, experience, retail, training, global

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Is UCaaS Growing? – Oct 31, 2016

Tidbits #2444 (Telecom and Otherwise) – Jan 04, 2017

Tidbits #2441 – Nov 09, 2016

Is There Anything Impressive About VoIP? – Jan 11, 2016

Unified Hope for UCaaS – Dec 16, 2015

The Next Step in UCaaS – Aug 27, 2014

Two New VoIP Offerings – Jan 05, 2017

UCaaS Round-Up (Tidbits 2443) – Nov 16, 2016

Marketing Lesson from the Election – Nov 09, 2016

What Pain Does UCaaS Solve? – Aug 22, 2016

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January 18, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Women in Tech at ITEXPO

On Wed., 2/8 at 3 pm, I will be moderating a panel on Women in Tech at ITEXPO in Ft Lauderdale. Why is a guy moderating this panel? Probably because I wanted to see this session at ITEXPO. When I took it to TMC, Dave and Erik told me to run with it.

This topic has been on my mind for some time. The fraternity of telecom seemed to boil over last summer. We just had a presidential election cycle where one candidate played the gender card as several right media outlets put it, while also being maligned because of her gender. That played out on a national level.

Having run startup and tech events in Tampa for years, it is still largely a male dominated space. Just 18% of Computer Science Degrees go to Women. How many Entrepreneurship degrees go to women? Probably less.

In the last year, there have been a number of articles like this one about Why Women Quit Tech. To address this and have a good discourse, a panel of distinguished women was chosen from volunteers:

Caitlin Clark-Zigmond, VP of Product at CoreDial;
Angela Leavitt, CEO of Mojo Marketing;
Karin Fields, CEO of master agency MicroCorp;
Grace Schroeder, CEO of software house SLINGR.

As one female CEO wrote me, “You know what is interesting is that a lot of this article is exactly what Sheryl Sandberg wrote in “Lean in.” For the most part women in Tech are in marketing and operations. They aren’t in the “driving” positions.” True enough, because as I look at the Board of Women in Channel, half are in marketing and half are in channel sales. (Also, not certain how many expo attendees have read or heard about Sandberg’s book.)

Come join the discussion in Ft Lauderdale!

Tags: itexpo, technology, women
Related tags: women, marketing, panel, because, itexpo

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Salute to Women in Tech – Feb 21, 2015

MSP EXPO Panel on Differentiation – Jan 04, 2017

Happy New Year! – Dec 30, 2016

Big Data Comes to Bosses with Prodoscore – Sep 06, 2016

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Tidbits # 2436 – May 18, 2016

Follow the Money – May 04, 2016

What Are They Feeding Enterprise? – Mar 09, 2016

Open Source Versus Commercial Software (Part 3) – Feb 16, 2016

How To Win at UCaaS – Feb 03, 2016

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January 17, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

The Fight to Make a Living in Cloud

How many articles and keynotes have been about how channel partners aren’t jumping into cloud? I find it funny that it is mainly vendors and “consultants” saying this. It’s Microsoft. It’s every booth at CP Expo. It is the channel magazines (like here) and the channel consultants.

The one thing missing from this cloud strategy: business model.

For all the talk about monthly recurring revenue, the commissions off cloud services are tiny compared with the time it takes to sell and support.

Even with the drop in uptime for carriers, the amount of support for network services is small. The sale is easy. The commissions are fair. High ROI.

Microsoft Office365 is starts at $60 per seat per year. That is a commission of fifty cents! If the client calls with just one support call, all of your profit is gone.

In network, almost all carriers deliver services as advertised. There isn’t really a big trust issue with the customers. It’s plugged in and usually works. Stays up most of the time.

The same can be said of PRI. But SIP trunks? That gets tricky with inter-operability, with porting numbers, with quality of service. There are so many providers that it isn’t even possible to do an apples to apples comparison. Easier to sell POTS lines, in my opinion.

UCaaS has been notorious for porting problems; QoS issues; lack of user training; and deployment mishaps. Also, too many features, not enough pain for the buyer to move to what looks like a complex system. At ARPU of about $350, that is a lot to overcome to make a little bit of money. The SPIFF War that pays out up to 6X MRC is getting attention, especially if the partner can just throw a lead over the fence, let the ITSP close it and collect his $200 after passing GO!

The big impact from cloud is the integration. But who is going to do that integration? Who is going to come in and add the Zaps or the IFTTT? Who is going to script together the various pieces of software to get data to flow without swivel chair?

On a client call recently, they mentioned that many IBM A/S-400s are still in service. Those applications don’t easily port to the cloud for a number of reasons. There are a number of software applications that won’t easily port to the cloud. That’s why we have the Hybrid Cloud strategy, right? Which just means that some stuff stays as is, some stuff goes to AWS/MS/IBM/Rackspace, some stuff moves to a private data center. (SD-WAN plays the part of making that network optimized for a hybrid environment, or as I like to call it the usual system.)

I’m not saying cloud isn’t here to stay (see here). I am saying that the Business Model for Partners to be Cloud First has not become mainstream yet.

A good Cloud Engineer/Cloud Architect or a knowledgeable Sales Engineer are expensive full time positions. It would take a lot of large deals to begin to offset that investment in talent. There is a new skill set needed for cloud services that wasn’t needed for managed IT services. New sales skill set too as the sale transitions from transactional replacement of services (cable for T1 or Ethernet for T1) to consultative selling involving business needs and impact.

“What we’ve found working with clients who want to begin taking advantage of the cloud’s cost and accessibility advantages is that they will start new projects in the cloud, but will leave their legacy systems intact.” To find these deals, you would need to be proactive in marketing your firm as a cloud expert (and actually have the chops to pull it off without burning the client and your reputation, which is a real problem that vendors don’t want to address.)

Personally, I wonder about the economics of cloud. VDI, UCaaS, CRM and Office 365 are going to cost you ($40+$30+$100+$5) roughly $175 per month per employee. At 99 employees that is $200K per year. Seems like a lot, but if you are the partner and you get most of that share that is $20K per year in commission.

Tags: channel partners, cloud communications, cloud computing, cloud services broker, commissions, microsoft
Related tags: cloud services, cloud strategy, applications easily, integration going, business model, cloud