On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 30 of 376

Can You Lower the Price?

When a partner asks for a lower price what is he saying?

He is selling a commodity.
He is presenting a couple of quotes.
He is not selling your stuff exclusively on this deal..

Granted in many cases, network IS a commodity. And so is Internet Access! And clients indeed DO buy on price. Customers also have unrealistic expectations about price. (Seriously unrealistic.)

I am working on a 10GB Wave deal now. It is a commodity to my client. To me, for the most part, too. Who cares which carrier as long as they are lit in both data centers and can hit the price point? And then deliver said service.

In the case of UCaaS, we may look at it like a commodity, but it isn’t as standard as a private line being delivered. Lots more moving parts. No standards. Too many features and check boxes to hit. If it is being sold on price, it’s because no one knows why UC(A) over UC(B). Who’s fault is that?

When a partner asks for special pricing, he wants to sell your company. Channel Managers should gather some feedback. Use that feedback.

Tags: bandwidth, channel managers, channel partners, price war
Related tags: lower price, price, commodity

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

The WalMart Effect on the Duopoly – Jun 17, 2015

The Pressure of Price – Oct 17, 2016

Channel Partner Enablement Tools – Oct 10, 2016

Is Your Channel Program Up to Standards? – Sep 28, 2016

Where Are We Now? Ode to the Agent – Aug 09, 2016

Talking to Channel Managers – Jul 01, 2016

The Struggle of the Channel Managers – Jun 23, 2016

The Channel Has Changed, Have You? – Mar 04, 2016

Winstream’s Blunder Customers, Agents Are Paying For – Feb 22, 2016

Channel Relationships – Feb 16, 2016

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: Can You Lower the Price?

October 19, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Are You Managing Hours or Outcomes?

Another consultant is having a trying experience with a client. The client wants to see the consultant in the office more, but not pay for it. It seems that the client is used to buying hours, not outcomes.

I have run into quite a few companies that have never hired a consultant before. I figure that they are used to hiring bodies and managing bodies. They manage the hours you work; not the outcome of the work.

They do hire vendors, for example, a PR firm or a softswitch. On the one hand, with the softswitch they know exactly what they are buying. With the PR firm, it is more intangible. Both are managed differently.

Salespeople ideally are managed by outcome, but not really. Many salespeople do not hit quota nor do the perform the necessary daily activities. So no, they are not managed by results. The managers are managing bodies and hours.

If you rent a car, you don’t want to own it or maintain it. You want it to get you around safely, while you have it. If you want, you can rent a better, faster, more luxurious car, but all you are doing is contracting for transportation during the prescribed hours.

That is how some consulting works. The consultant comes in for a set number of days or hours, bangs out the presentation, does some Q&A, sets a strategy, crafts a killer message, plans a product launch, then the company takes over from there. They hired for a specific function, a bunch of knowledge or guidance. This is not unlike hiring a lawyer or going to the doctor.

Consultants bill by the project or by the hour. Billing by the project is fine if there aren’t any snags. In web design, there is usually scope creep and changes, which sink many a web design project – both for the designer and the customer.

When hourly billing, buyers may look for the cheapest supplier. That is when you know that they are buying hours, not outcomes. It might also be that they don’t know what to look for when hiring that talent or skill.

We are moving to a freelancer economy – 40% of the population is now part of the connection economy. Managers are going to have to adjust to hiring tasks, projects, output, activity – as opposed to hiring bodies.

In a management webinar I am presenting, I am working towards re-adjusting managers’ thinking towards salespeople. CRM was supposed to make sales activities more transparent – or at least trackable. It has been 16 years since Salesforce took off – and sales departments are still fighting CRM! And managers are not using the functionality to manage the funnel and the team.

Jim Rohn, a business philosopher, said, “You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.” True, but you get managed by the hour, not the output. In a world of big data and analytics, we still manage like there is still a wall phone.

Tags: crm, management, sales
Related tags: hours outcomes, hiring bodies, buying hours, managing bodies, hours, hiring

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

2 Ways to Increase Your Revenue – Jul 08, 2015

One Good Reason for CRM – Aug 11, 2013

4 Notes About CRM – Jul 06, 2011

Channel Partner Enablement Tools – Oct 10, 2016

Channel Agnostic or Parity? – Sep 30, 2016

Tidbits #2438 – Jun 07, 2016

4 Points on Selling Broadview OfficeSuite UC – May 26, 2016

Most Businesses Fear Change – May 19, 2016

What Does Hybrid Cloud Look Like? – May 11, 2016

Replaced by a Robot – May 05, 2016

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: Are You Managing Hours or Outcomes?

October 18, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

The Pressure of Price

I have spoken to many in the industry this year who are upset that the channel isn’t bringing in more deals – non-network deals.

As one CEO told me, “Luddites are still selling network. And the price compression is killing everyone.” I know. Revenue and price compression are working against everyone.

I get requests for Gigabit pipes in rural areas that come with a budget of less than $3K. It is unrealistic, but you can’t explain it to people. They don’t want to hear it.

Providers would like to sell more managed services. They probably could if they told a better story besides we want to manage your technology. MSPs do a good job of explaining the value of outsourced services to businesses, but carriers do not (yet).

While partners hear all the chatter about cloud, colo, SD-WAN and UCaaS, they realize that network is the easier sale. And you have to sell more and more to stay even.

Some of it is a Trust issue. If the vendor has screwed up number porting on a PRI or POTS line, are you really going to sell their UCaaS?

If the carrier can’t find their network maps, do you think they can do a good job with SD-WAN?

If the billing is always an issue, why would you sell complicated stuff with that vendor?

Personally, I have an issue selling managed router. It is overly automated with no human interaction at all. Automated emails and trouble tickets mean an angry customer.

Would I use that carrier for managed security? Um, no.

Some of it is a Clarity problem. By that I mean, the vendor catalog is so larg – and it is usually delivered to the channel in a fashion similar to confetti: thrown at you. There needs to be more context. What is the core product? How do the rest of those services align or add value to that core? Who buys it? Why do they buy it?

Additionally, there needs to be more proof that clients are buying it.

Meanwhile, another provider enters the network fray: Google Fiber is looking to partners to reach the small business market. “Aaron Withrow, channel partner manager for Google Fiber, acknowledged the challenges in selling to businesses and offering them value beyond a boatload of bandwidth.” [CP]

An ASIDE: the reason folks sell SIP Trunks in place of UCaaS is a similar argument. It is a faster sale – straight up replacement transaction.

Tags: bandwidth, broadsoft, channel partners, fiber, gigabit, internet, managed services, sellecom, selling
Related tags: google fiber, price compression, network, issue, selling, ucaas

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

Get Off the Agents’ Back – Apr 12, 2012

Channel Partner Enablement Tools – Oct 10, 2016

Channel Agnostic or Parity? – Sep 30, 2016

Where Are We Now? Ode to the Agent – Aug 09, 2016

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

What Channel Are You Watching? – Apr 25, 2016

The Channel Has Changed, Have You? – Mar 04, 2016

Some M&A – Feb 10, 2016

Everyone Wants You to be an MSP – Nov 05, 2015

FCC Moves on Frontier and the Internet – Sep 14, 2015

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: The Pressure of Price

October 17, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

The Data Center Market is at a Peak

It’s quite the claim to make: that the data center market is at a peak. Here’s why I think it is.

“Today’s IT industry is dealing with data explosion. Therefore, companies need a data management system to manage the huge amount of generated data. Data centers are already under tremendous expansion mode in terms of storage and computing to accommodate the growing volumes of data and run computation on top of it,” writes CIO Review. Data retention also factors into space. IOT will increase data stored and analyzed and retained. Private cloud, hybrid cloud and computing infrastructure have to be housed somewhere.

Space isn’t really the limiting factor. Power is. Cooling is also becoming a limiting factor. Cooling to some degree affects the power. The US had not built a new power plant since 1996 — until Wats Bar 2 came online in Tennessee this year.

Solar farms are starting to pop up. And there has been activity in wind farms. Amazon is turning up a wind farm in Texas. “Iron Mountain, a global storage and information management service firm, has agreed to purchase up to 100,000 MWh of power from the in-development Amazon Wind Farm Texas.”

Google is working on a zero waste data center. ” it takes a lot of power and resources to do all that data churn [from Google search, Docs, Drive, Music, YouTube, etc], which is potentially quite wasteful. Thankfully, however, the search giant has committed to a new initiative called Zero Waste to Landfills so that all of the waste from those data centers will be reused or diverted to a more sustainable route.”

That is just the moves to make running data centers cheaper. But that means that data centers are going to be around a long time — and there will be more of them.

Facebook’s data center in Sweden made a social splash via a virtual tour. These giants – FB, GOOG, Amazon – are getting creative with data center builds, designs and usage.

The amount of M&A activity is high (compared to previous years and dollar values of the deals.) One example is Windstream selling its data center business to Tierpoint for a big profit. I mentioned some of this back in January. Since then, CenturyLink is taking bids for its data center business that it put together with Qwest Cyber Centers and Savvis.

Verizon is near a deal to sell its Terremark division, according to reports. That $3B will help VZ buy some more spectrum — or just to pay off the debt on the AOL purchase.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is exploring a sale of Vantage Data Centers, looking for a billion dollars.

ViaWest is expanding in Denver.

There are federal mandates for data center optimization that must be met by 2018.

Data centers play a huge part in IT – whether the company has public cloud or private cloud or a colo. The hybrid nature of IT infrastructure for the enterprise lends itself to a continued reliance on data centers in the US.

Tags: cloud computing, collocation, data center, mergers
Related tags: center market, center business, limiting factor, private cloud, centers, center

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

4 Moves in January – Jan 09, 2014

VZ Buys Terremark for $1.4B – Jan 28, 2011

Tidbits #2439 – Oct 03, 2016

Data Center M&A to Start off 2016 – Jan 11, 2016

Data Center Outlook for 2016 – Jan 06, 2016

Lessons from the NGC15 – Dec 10, 2015

COLOTRAQ Talking About DCI-TRAQ – Aug 31, 2015

IPR Secure’s Channel Chief on Merger and More – Mar 06, 2015

The M&A Picks Up Steam – Jan 14, 2015

The Expo News Update – Sep 09, 2014

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: The Data Center Market is at a Peak

Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

October 17, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Doing Business in a Busy, Blurred Environment

Logging on to LinkedIn these days, I have to remind myself that it is in fact LI and not Facebook. The feeds look the same.

I know we have blurred the lines between work and life, but come on. I often wonder if that isn’t a symptom of why we are so unproductive. We are always connected, constant thoughts of work results in no rest, no real down time and for a few burn out. For most, periods of unproductivity.

When you have a structured work day of 8 hours, does it make work easier to accomplish? Knowing you have to get stuff done in allotted time? Yet when you factor in the doing more with less and more and more to do (especially for sales and marketing people), that is stress that adds to unproductive.

I look at LinkedIN and wonder if people have forgotten what work is. Correlate that to sales, especially relationship building types of sales, and we wonder why sales are off. We wonder why it is hard to hit sales numbers. No one knows when to work — or what work looks like – or what business relationships look like.

According to a survey by Microsoft, 46 percent of workers say their productivity has improved thanks to social media and social media tools.

“Research from the University of California, Irvine, shows productivity rises in the late morning around 11 a.m. and peaks between 2 and 3 p.m.” [fortune]

A study by Cornerstone found that work overload was cited as a factor that decreased productivity by 68 percent of employees surveyed, who felt that the hours required to complete their work on a daily basis outnumbered the hours in their workday. [source]

A study by Cornerstone OnDemand found that 43 percent of employees surveyed feel that unscheduled interruptions by coworkers are the biggest obstacle when it comes to productivity.

Research conducted by Stanford University cites that multitasking may ultimately be decreasing our general intelligence. Multitasking gives the illusion of higher productivity, but it is hard to cut down 6 trees by swinging the axe at each only once per hour.

“A survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that most Americans actually work normal hours and get regular sleep, despite their reputation for being overtired and overworked. [QZ]

So we want to look busy and be busy, complain about being busy, but we aren’t actually productive. Some of it is distractions. Some of it is Fear.

“A study lead by the University of California, Irvine, and presented at the South by Southwest panel on workplace distraction, found employees were actually happiest when performing these rote tasks. Why is busywork secretly so enjoyable? It’s because completing busywork gives you a feeling of accomplishment without the corresponding stress which comes along with more challenging tasks.” [fortune]

We admire busy because we confuse it with being accomplished. We don’t grasp the difference between Urgent and Important.

Covey Quadrant

In some cases, we know what we have to, what we should do, but we don’t do it. We don’t want to work that hard for success. We don’t want to break our comfort zone. We don’t want to risk it.

These are just observations, but I think we confuse being happy with a social media infused FOMO view of success. We dream about being a multi-millionaire – through lottery or a unicorn start-up idea – with all the toys and imagine there is no down-side and that with money all our problems go away and we are magically happy. (Does Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton look happy?) That is a dream, but that isn’t our goal, which is closer to paying the bills, going on vacation, spending time with family & friends, enjoying the journey of life. That is the opposite of the millionaire dream life. Happy requires purpose and meaningful work. The problem there is meaningfulwork, Creative work, takes up time, effort and risk. OOPS!

Hugh writes, “The thing that turns a job into passion, that turns work into play, is a sense of mission.”

It’s like the current push to be an entrepreneur. It is everywhere, but most people do not have the skills or drive to do it. Startups fail for a variety of reasons. We have glamorized the failures – Pets.com, Friendster, Boo.com, Webvan and more. But all anyone talks about is raising money, not building a viable business – or building a company to last.

We have forgotten to focus on the goals. And to enjoy the journey as well.

Managing more sales is part time management and part reflection.

Tags: linkedin, social media, social networks
Related tags: social media, california irvine, percent employees, employees surveyed, study cornerstone, sales

Follow me:

Twitter Profile