Day two of CompTIA ChannelCon 2013, the premier education and partnering event for the IT channel, which wrapped up this week at the Peabody Orlando, featured a panel discussion titled “Best Practices in Selling Telecom.” This was moderated by Khali Henderson, editor-in-chief at Channel Partners, and drew insights from panelists Ken Bisnoff, senior vice president of strategic opportunities at TelePacific Communications, Paul Cronin, senior vice president at Atrion Networking, Jeffrey Ponts, executive vice president and chief operating officer at DataTel Solutions, and Dwayne Sloan, partner at PCM Networking.
Asked what changes they’ve seen recently in telecom and the best way to approach the current state of the market, the panelists gave a range of responses. Cronin pointed out that telecom sales can introduce you to new business decision makers in a company and generate new overall sales. Sloan said VoIP has changed the game in telecom sales because of the convergence it has allowed; it makes good use of telecoms’ established core competencies. Ponts, meanwhile, stressed that it’s important to pick the right partners, because there’s a 95 percent chance that a three-year contract becomes a six-year contract. Bisnoff advised avoiding being just a piece of the equation to the customer, because that leaves the door open for the competition to remove you.
Later on day two, Jeff Mesnik, founder and president of ContentMX, presented “Leverage Content Strategy to Define Marketing and Improve Sales.” He kicked off his remarks by stating that companies can’t just get on social media networks; they have to figure out what they’re doing there. This is basic advice but unfortunately not something a lot of companies realize. Mesnik recommended assigning a unique goal of approach to each social network where a company means to establish itself, as they all function differently and have different strategic importance and uses.
Mesnik also talked through best practices in e-mail marketing as it relates to the explosion of mobile, pointing out that “more people use a mobile phone than a toothbrush,” so any marketing e-mail must be effective on mobile. According to Mesnik, when Career Builder adjusted its e-mails to mobile it saw a 25 percent increase in clicks. He also recommended that the people managing e-mail and social media in a given organization work together.
Crowdsourcing was another big topic of the session. Mesnik explained that companies can harvest strong blog content from something as simple as a LinkedIn discussion. He advised that companies develop an editorial calendar with any vendors they work with. When an attendee pointed out that people or companies may object to having their content used in this way, Mesnik countered that as long as such content use is sourced, it’s generally viewed positively. Everyone, including Google, he said, loves having their site or profile pointed to by an external site.
Day three saw “Business Transformation in Managed Services,” a panel moderated by Carolyn April, director of industry analysis at CompTIA. The panel was made up of Len DiCostanzo, senior vice president of community and business development at Autotask, Jeannine Edwards, director at ConnectWise, Amy Luby, vice president of global sales and marketing at Mailprotector, John Tippett, COO at EDTS, and Chris Wiser, founder and CEO of TechSquad IT.
The panel was asked by April what in managed services has recently changed that has made them pivot and do things differently. Wiser said that he used to work long hours as a one-man operation, and now that he’s maintaining a staff he faces difficulty finding the right talent. Edwards explained she has been on a mission to transition from per-user billing to per-device billing; build understanding of service level agreements (SLAs); and get people to power-use the tools they’re given. Tippett said the margins on managed services are getting thinner, so he’s looking to strip out any inefficiency. Luby stressed figuring out what your identity is as a business; that you have to figure out your core competency. DiCostanzo, meanwhile, advised doing a monthly operational review with clients; not just to make a case for yourself but to get more work and learn continually about the client.
As the discussion moved down to a more granular level, Tippett said that if a client asks you to install something and you didn’t sell it to them; that should be a red flag. This prompted Wiser to relay a story in which his firm lost a school as a client by doing too good of a job for them. TechSquad IT got the school into a position where they felt they could subsist with an internal employee (poached from TechSquad IT). Edwards returned to her hobby-horse of SLAs by asking for a show of hands of who in the room does them. Few hands went up. She said this is because there’s a fear factor surrounding SLAs; MSPs worry they may promise a customer something they can’t deliver. DiCostanzo advised easing into such promises by first testing to see if they’re already delivering them, then promising them to the client.
April, meanwhile, called for a show of hands of those in the room who call themselves MSPs. Most hands in the room went up. She then asked how many people in the room derive 75 percent of their revenue from managed services. Few hands went up. She conducted the same informal poll at CompTIA’s Annual Membership Meeting earlier this year, getting roughly the same response, indicating the needle hasn’t moved much here in the last four months.
