On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 32 of 376

Tidbits #2439

Sonus bought Taqua for about $20 million. Taqua builds a Class 4/5 voice switch that has been around a long while with 400 customers globally (a little less than BSFT). “Total revenue was $28.3 million and $25.2 million for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014, respectively. Total revenue was $16.8 million for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2016.” Taqua had pivoted to Voice over Wireless recently. Sonus is notable for its SBC. No idea how this mash-up plays out. Customer consolidation is one squeeze, but the other squeeze comes from all vendors now offer a wide portfolio – SBC, eSBC, switches, SDN, NFV, blah blah blah. Makes it tough in a me-too market with buyers who are either too busy or stuck in a purchasing maze.

In the world of Anti-Virus, two Czech companies are merging. Avast made a $1.3B offer for all the public shares of AVG.

Jon Arnold has a nice write up from MoNage – Messaging on the Net – about messaging and comms. Interesting stats. It explains the Slack phenomenon.

From 451 Research Group, Colocation vs. Cloud: “Many providers claim that SMBs are skipping colocation and going straight to the cloud. However, 451 Research studies show that this isn’t so black and white. In the ‘S’ portion of the SMB market (<249 employees), companies are more likely to have some sort of cloud-based service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS or hosted private cloud) than colocation services, but only by a margin of about 19 percentage points (49% to 30%). In the 'M' segment of the SMB market (250-999 employees), the numbers are about even between cloud and colocation services (38.2% to 38.9%, respectively)."

Tags: collocation, data center, mergers, security, unified messaging, voice traffic, voip
Related tags: revenue million, total revenue, million, taqua

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October 3, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Channel Agnostic or Parity?

As Telarus CEO Adam Edwards explained channel agnostic means “no preference of whether sales come through the direct channel or partner channel.” Usually that means the buyer doesn’t care if it is a direct salesperson or a channel partner (as in the case with Microsoft or Cisco).

In telecom, that usually means that the C-Suite doesn’t care where the revenue comes from – indirect or direct. If you look at current available data between 35-65% of new mid-market deals are coming in from channel. So yeah the C-Suite doesn’t acre where the new revenue comes from – as long as it comes in.

For Wall Street it is all about the revenue. On Main Street, where channel partners earn their living, it does matter. Agnostic does not mean Parity.

Parity means that Direct and Indirect have the same pricing team, same promotions and get the pricing at the same time. Everything is equal.

Parity, in some eyes, is pairing up the partner with a direct rep. Personally, I don’t get it, but Qwest, Smoothstone and other carriers have used that strategy. That is duel compensation – and the CFO won’t let that happen forever. It messes with margin, profits and EBITDA.

I was at a non-telecom client this week discussing channel strategies. They asked about Channel Conflict. This is a well known “feature” of channel agnostic sales. Some companies have Ink Wins as the motto. This usually means dirty pool. Someone is pulling tricks to get the contract without the work. (Been there, seen that, have the tee-shirt.)

Other programs use Deal Registration. Deal Registration is great in theory but, in some cases, the sales teams just upload their contact lists as “deal reg”! Best way to handle this is a CRM system that can track activity. Who talked to who, when, about what? What was the follow up like?

There has to be a top down understanding of channel in order to have parity. Often, the C-Suite only cares about the top line – and the VPs or Directors fight it out. That seems healthy, right?

Channel Parity is possible. And it is better than Channel Agnostic.

Tags: channel partners, sales, sellecom, selling
Related tags: channel agnostic, usually means, channel partner, suite doesn, revenue comes, channel

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September 30, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Are You Busy or Productive?

Everyone is busy. Super busy. So busy. But are you productive?

Are you stepping closer to your goals? Or just running in place like on a treadmill?

Are you working TOWARDS your goals? (Do you even have goals to work towards? Too many replace Quota with Goal.)

Are the activities you are spending your time on Revenue Generating? Or Strategic?

Is it Urgent or Important?

Can it be delegated? (For Freelancers and Agents, Virtual Assistants are fantastic!)

Start thinking about what you are trading that time for? Was it worth it? If we charged ourselves our hourly rate for the way we spend time, we would change our habits.

From my favorite blogger: “No one complains of having spent an entire day doing ‘productive work’. Busywork, on the other hand, is mind-numbing.
Business means producing things of actual value.
There are 2 kinds of busy: see here.

Pareto’s Principle goes further than we thought.

Want more time management hacks and tips? Join the webinar.

Tags: time management
Related tags: productive, goals

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September 28, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Is Your Channel Program Up to Standards?

You have a channel program but it isn’t going well. There might be solid reasons for this.

You might be too hard to do business with. Too much friction and I will sell the other guy.

Right now, you might not be paying enough, especially in relation to your product value or ease of doing business with you.

Your partners may not want to sell what you want them to sell. And you can’t make them.

Your support of partners isn’t what it could be. That could be that quotes take too long; that there isn’t enough self-serve; that the channel people don’t know enough or unhelpful or just clueless.

Just a bit too much channel conflict. Right now, a partner I know is getting rooked out of a lot of commission on a Big Logo that they delivered to the vendor. The vendor took over the account. These are reasons that we stay away from vendors. We don’t want to get screwed over on commissions!!!!

In the case of at least 3 vendors I can think of, word on the street is that you aren’t really channel friendly. You are in when it suits you; and out when it doesn’t. So partners don’t like risk like that.

Tough to get honest feedback but you should ask — if you really want to hear it – and say that you CAN take it. Then just accept it.

Tags: channel managers, channel partners, commissions
Related tags: channel program, channel, partners, might, enough

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September 28, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Billion Dollar Time Bomb

It used to be a celebration to hit a billion dollars in revenue in the CLEC space. It was like they crossed the finish line, because after they hit the billion dollar revenue mark, they went for beers and never looked back. And these Billion $ CLECs tumbled.

Intermedia was the first. They ended up selling to MCI due to the amount of short term debt that was due. (Reminder: don’t acquire companies using an AMEX card!)

PAETEC hit a billion and sold to Windstream.

Cbeyond only made it half way there before looking for a buyer. Eventually Birch bought them.

EarthLink hit a billion. That is all. Tried a lot of stuff, not a lot worked. Today they are making a niche play in retail, while trying to figure out what to do with the fiber network.

XO hit a billion and became totally irrelevant for a long while until Verizon decided to buy them. That seemed to ignite a fire in the belly of XO.

Covad and other DLECs tanked quickly after Big IPO’s, because it was just too difficult to navigate the waters of telecom (especially without a C-Suite with that kind of domain knowledge. Next time hire a former SVP or EVP from a LEC!) Google Fiber is seeing those same problems, stumbling its way to less than 250K subscribers in 5 years of labor and marketing hype.

In Jim Collins Built to Last, some of the elements to lasting success are Culture, BHAGs (vision and goals) and home-grown management (talent development). It has to be about more than the race to a billion.

I see this with UC and Cloud companies. Many of them on a race to a Billion. It should only be a race to get 25,000 profitable customers. Then 35K, then 40K, then 50K. And that will be a big business right there.

But NO!!! It has to be a Unicorn! What a stupid attitude. I see it over and over. I want thousands of partners. I want to sell from 1-1000 employees. But the clock is broken. The systems and procedures suck. There isn’t a culture of excellence.

Heck, even college athletics departments know about building a culture of excellence.

I can see a couple of the big UC companies struggling and eventually failing. It isn’t about what can you sell. It IS about what can you Deploy and Support!

The process to deploy 20 seats is NOT the same as the process to deploy 500 seats.

BE A CLOCK BUILDER, NOT A TIME TELLER – Jim Collins

Tags: books, culture, deployment, financials, strategy
Related tags: culture excellence, deploy seats, billion dollar, process deploy, billion, culture