News out of the Wall Street Journal has Avaya contemplating a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and selling off its call center unit.

The problem with Avaya is it is over-leveraged, which we will be saying about many telecom companies in the coming two years. The on-premise or hardware PBX business did not fold like everyone thought. However, it didn’t grow either. It slowly declined at about 3% per year.

Before its user conference, Broadsoft announced that it had hit 15 million licenses. According to Elka Popova, “The BroadSoft installed base is hosted IP telephony seats, fully-loaded UCaaS seats and business VoIP lines.” So that just means licenses – even for SIP Trunks. About 3 million of those belong to Windstream and XO (1 million and 2 million SIP trunks respectively.) Who knows how many actual hosted seats there are.

Cisco has one-third that. Office365 is at 70 million users. All of that eats into, not just Avaya, but everyone.

Avaya’s transition to cloud was slow and clunky. Mitel wasn’t smoother but it was faster. It looked like the hardware folks – Zultys, Mitel, Avaya, NEC, Siemens, ININ – were content to keep on trucking. They treated Hosted PBX much like MSO’s treat cord-cutting – deny, deny, deny – until it bites you in the ass! Then you get the lawyers, bankers and start filing BK.

“Spun off from Lucent Technologies in 2000, Avaya was a publicly traded company until 2007, when it was taken private by Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital for more than $8 billion.” [source] $8 Billion about 9 years ago. In the meantime, they did acquire a few companies, including some Nortel assets.

Channele2e reports, “software and cloud revenues aren’t growing quickly enough to offset falling hardware revenues. Total Q2 revenue was $904 million, down $54 million compared to the prior quarter, and down $91 million year-over-year, as demand for unified communications products continued to contract, Avaya said.”

They have been talking about an IPO or spinning off Zang or selling off a division like Networking or Call Center. We’ll see what happens.

Tags: BK, broadsoft, call center, hardware, hosted pbx, pbx, UC
Related tags: million million, million, avaya, seats, hosted, hardware

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News out of the Wall Street Journal has Avaya contemplating a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and selling off its call center unit.

The problem with Avaya is it is over-leveraged, which we will be saying about many telecom companies in the coming two years. The on-premise or hardware PBX business did not fold like everyone thought. However, it didn’t grow either. It slowly declined at about 3% per year.

Before its user conference, Broadsoft announced that it had hit 15 million licenses. According to Elka Popova, “The BroadSoft installed base is hosted IP telephony seats, fully-loaded UCaaS seats and business VoIP lines.” So that just means licenses – even for SIP Trunks. About 3 million of those belong to Windstream and XO (1 million and 2 million SIP trunks respectively.) Who knows how many actual hosted seats there are.

Cisco has one-third that. Office365 is at 70 million users. All of that eats into, not just Avaya, but everyone.

Avaya’s transition to cloud was slow and clunky. Mitel wasn’t smoother but it was faster. It looked like the hardware folks – Zultys, Mitel, Avaya, NEC, Siemens, ININ – were content to keep on trucking. They treated Hosted PBX much like MSO’s treat cord-cutting – deny, deny, deny – until it bites you in the ass! Then you get the lawyers, bankers and start filing BK.

“Spun off from Lucent Technologies in 2000, Avaya was a publicly traded company until 2007, when it was taken private by Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital for more than $8 billion.” [source] $8 Billion about 9 years ago. In the meantime, they did acquire a few companies, including some Nortel assets.

Channele2e reports, “software and cloud revenues aren’t growing quickly enough to offset falling hardware revenues. Total Q2 revenue was $904 million, down $54 million compared to the prior quarter, and down $91 million year-over-year, as demand for unified communications products continued to contract, Avaya said.”

They have been talking about an IPO or spinning off Zang or selling off a division like Networking or Call Center. We’ll see what happens.

Tags: BK, broadsoft, call center, hardware, hosted pbx, pbx, UC
Related tags: million million, million, avaya, seats, hosted, hardware

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Tidbits #2438 – Jun 07, 2016

ITEXPO Update – Jan 30, 2014

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

Marketing Lesson from the Election – Nov 09, 2016

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UC Tidbits #2441 – Jul 05, 2016

UCaaS Tidbits #2440 – Jul 05, 2016

Selling UCaaS as a Solution with Velis4 – Jun 17, 2016

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AT&T is buying TimeWarner.
Verizon bought AOL and is buying Yahoo.
Comcast invested $200M in BuzzFeed.
AT&T and DISH are “partnering to acquire INVIDI Technologies. Ad agency WPP is also part of the deal, which gives AT&T a controlling interest in the addressable advertising technology firm.“

Content and ad money is the only area of growth for the Duopoly.

An analyst is projected that Cable companies will be the Incumbent Phone company in 2017 due to the number of cable phone lines sold compared to telco. The RBOCs have been trying to get out of the incumbent label for years, much to the chagrin of their ILEC brethren like Frontier, Windstream, CenturyLink and Fairpoint, who wish that the RBOCs would shut up.

The RBOCs have cellular, voice, data, broadband, big pipe, managed services, data centers and cloud in the catalog but the cash cow was the consumer triple play. Much like EarthLink and AOL floated on dial-up revenues for years, ILECs float on wireline revenues. Unfortunately, cable is eating their lunch in the broadband market.

Easier to dump a billion or four into a company that will provide some top line revenue than spend $24 billion on fiber to the home, where Verizon lost money.

Telco has pension and union liabilities that cable does not. These liabilities are now mainly under the RLEC umbrella in the form of CenturyLink, Fairpoint and Frontier, who purchased assets from many other ILECs and RBOCs, including the pension liabilities. It is quite the financial burden.

Content is the next revenue stream for the telco, following in the footsteps of cable, who have owned TV stations and content for years.

No idea how the telcos arrived at advertising as a viable revenue stream (maybe they are following Google’s model). Yet “AT&T reports $1.5 billion and growing in annual revenue for its AT&T AdWorks division. That unit aggregates 14 million households and 35 million set-top-boxes nationwide, managing ad inventory across national ad-supported cable networks. AT&T claims it’s the largest addressable advertising network in the industry, thanks in large part to its acquisition of DIRECTV.” [telecomp]

It looks like we will soon be back in the days of AOL and Prodigy, where your ecosystem will be defined by your cell phone operating system (Android or Apple) and cell provider and broadband provider. The cellcos are providing free bandwidth for staying inside the ecosystem, making it tough for companies like DISH/Sling, Netflix and Layer3. Captured users, eyeballs, viewer habits, buying habits, ads, etc. will result in big money per user. It is a similar model that Amazon uses with Prime and Kindle. Users of a Kindle device buy Prime and spend more than 3x what a non-Prime member spends. And we keep it in the ecosystem. Google, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all competing for you.

Tags: advertising, aol, broadband, cellular, competition, content, dish, ilec, mergers, numbers, privacy, rlec
Related tags: revenue stream, centurylink fairpoint, addressable advertising, cable, revenue, rbocs

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I don’t think Ican write one better than I did 2 years ago, so here’s a link to that piece.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Take a moment to reflect on the glass half full and the life fully lived while you’re reaching for the stuffing.

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Related tags: happy thanksgiving

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If you manage a sales team, direct or indirect, do you have any key performance indicators that you track?

Usually the only KPI we look at is Quota.

Yet we know that daily activity is the most important factor for success. That includes number of contacts per day via email, social media, phone calls.

The speed at which we follow up from an inbound lead is directly related to success. “Since Harvard’s study on response outcomes showed that sales reps that contacted leads within 1 hour were seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker, other studies have affirmed the findings.” [source: salesforce]

Are you tracking new logos (new accounts) that are opened? Yes, we need to retain and grow current accounts (and that is another KPI to measure). In some sales organizations, different reps have different responsibilities: like retention and account growth would be different than a hunter looking for new business (new logos, new accounts).

Sales math helps to break down the daily activity needed. If it takes 1000 dials to contact 30 people, you need to make 1000 dials a month. If it takes 30 contacts to get 3 sales, you understand what the numbers mean.

“A new study from AG Salesworks & BridgeGroup estimates that reps should be generating roughly 32 opportunities per 1,000 outbound calls. Keep in mind that those numbers were for outbound prospecting, a term that tends to include many calls that are relatively cold. So keep an eye on those call logs.” [source: salesforce]

“Persistence pays off. A National Sales Executive Association survey found that 48% of sales agents never follow up with leads a second time. This is significant since 10% of sales are closed on the fourth contact, and 80% are made on the fifth to 12th contact.” Can you track follow up?

How about Contacts added to a drop campaign or monthly newsletter?

Of course, we have Sales Target, Closing ratios, quota, average sales size, and sales cycle to measure as well. We can also measure by product. What are they selling and to who, which will provide data for follow up contacts. For example, a follow up email can say that we have sold to 310 banks and most of them have bought not just bandwidth but also our managed security product. This is food for thought for prospects plus productive follow up email content.

What you measure you can manage is what Peter Drucker said. If you are spending the money on Salesforce CRM, you might as well get the most of it.

Tags: crm, management, sales, sellecom, selling
Related tags: source salesforce, daily activity, sales, follow, contacts, measure

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