We use awful acronyms to describe products. IoT, UCaaS, CCaaS, SASE, SD-WAN. A few of those are Gartner’s fault. But we don’t effectively brand products. That ends up being the sales problem we have.
Our industry pushes product, mainly as replacement. That is what we are famous for: long distance minutes, integrated T1, broadband, SD-WAN, etc. It isn’t about benefits or outcomes; it is about being similar (“good enough”) and cheaper. So when it isn’t cheaper, defining Value is really difficult. And the price has to drop to close the transaction. It isn’t a sale. It is a transaction.
I was wondering why the focus is on POTS replacement. Yes, there are 30M copper lines left in America, but there wasn’t an immediate need to swap them out. That was manufactured by a few providers who decided lying about it was the way to go. Two of these companies blocked me on twitter for replying to their tweets, calling them dishonest.
There is never talk about county or city codes for elevator or alarm pairs. No talk about compliance or SLA or Uptime. Or Liability! There isn’t much talk about anything but switching those POTS lines that are price deregulated with a non-Five-Nine product for a nice SPIFF!
POTS lines are powered from the Central Office, not an electric outlet. POTS lines don’t need line of sight to work. Sure 1FBs are at $100-120 per line, so the industry sees the Arbitrage – and jumps in. That has been the way of the alternate providers for 30 years. Arbitrage and Replacement products for less money – a cost savings! BOOM! A new product is pushed.
They didn’t give this one a fancy acronym (yet).
But it fits the T1 Slinger mentality that people see the telecom Agent as.
This is also the Problem.
True UCaaS, CCaaS, cyber-security, and so many other solutions that vendors want to sell via the channel require actual selling. It requires Discovery Questions, listening, pain points, business outcomes and more. This isn’t a transaction. That’s why sales have stalled.
Selling Value during a macro economic environment isn’t order taking or transactional.
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