Telecom has become quite boring. One of my partners, Larry, left telecom almost 10 years ago because he was bored. As I read this morning’s rash of press releases, I can honestly say that only the Intermedia news is different. Everything else leaves me bored, shaking my head or ignoring it.
One provider who has pivoted at least three times launched a no-code AI-agent. Whoopee! There are several hundred providers that offer that. There is more CX news from 8×8 and others. Big deal. There are hundreds of CX providers. Buyers are confused.
Zendesk is adding Voice. Freshworks adding voice, chatbots and contact center. So everyone is becoming a platform – voice, ticketing, chat, CRM, billing, and more – all being one software bundle for the business.
ServiceNow, SalesForce and others are also hoping to be the main software bundle for the business.
CPaaS providers are offering softswitch solutions, plus SMS, chatbots, SIP Trunks, contact center, IVR in the cloud and so much more.
So where does that leave your average Broadsoft/Metaswitch/Netsapiens/Alianza provider?
This reminds me of the early 2000’s when VoIP providers would literally do anything for revenue: Origination, termination, trunking, white-label, softswitch partition, wholesale, you name it. Like AT&T, when you do it all, you do none of it well and you are known for that (doing nothing well). AT&T is a 149 year old brand. It is an ILEC and a top cellco. What have the rest of you got in terms of brand or history?
Why should a company throw away their current CX systems and jump on yours? Let me re-phrase that: Why should someone at Company B godfather an extensive migration project with you as the vendor that if it fails gets him fired? What assurances does he have that (a) the product will work; (b) the company will stand behind it; (c) it will solve his problem? Oh, and the company will be around by the time the contract expires?
This is the real world that sales people and partner face.
The other interesting news was Sangoma integrating with CallMyDoctor in what looks like a move to take on Weave. But then the quarterly numbers come out and Sangoma – like quite a few providers right now – missed its numbers, is exiting hardware, re-positioning. Blah, blah, blah. Truthfully, I don’t even know what platform integrates with CallMyDoc – was it Star2Star, VoIP Innovations, FreeSwitch, Schmooze, Digium, or Netfortis? Who knows? It is mornings like this that make me dislike telecom.
Most providers are not honest with themselves. They always approach it like they are AT&T or Comcast with 20M subscribers. Yet most providers never break 100K customers. 100K! A large percentage of those providers don’t break 25K customers. USLEC, PAETEC, Cbeyond? Under 100K. 8×8 has just 55K global customers and 3M+ seats.
They also want 1,000 partners!
If you approached your strategy that you only need to get 10K profitable customers, everything changes.
Did you know that of the approximately 60K MSPs in North America, 85% have less than 10 employees, serve less than 200 customers and have less than $5M in revenue??? Just for Perspective.
If you approach your channel strategy with only needing 25 aligned partners, your strategy gets simpler and clearer – and easier to execute.
If you approach the market like there are 7 segments, and pick 2 to win, your strategy is easier.
If you approach the market that you are going to win 2 verticals, your strategy is easier.
Instead, everyone wants to be Lay’s potato chips and thinks that everyone will buy them without even considering the Why You over Everyone else question.
The Me-too “innovation” is not very intuitive. Doing what your competitors do is fine if you are Unilever trying to keep up with P&G, but Pfizer doesn’t play me-too to AbbVie or Bristol-Myers Squibb.
What do your customers want/need? What would make their business better?
What can you deliver on?
What can you sell? What can your sales team and your partners sell?
What clear, concise and compelling story can you tell?
On two calls in the past two weeks with other partners and buyers and one thing was clear: Buying is on hold because there is too much noise. Buyers don’t believe the hype. (Probably because partners don’t believe the hype either. Many providers can’t deliver reliable service on what they have now, let alone vaporware they are hyping.)
When Buyers are confused, Status Quo wins. When status quo wins, sales don’t happen.
There are 3 sales happening at every opportunity: the Buyer has to believe in the product, the vendor and the salesperson/partner. They have to trust all 3. They have to trust that no one is fibbing and that the vendor will reliably deliver the product in a way that will benefit the business, as the partner says.
Yet instead of concrete use cases, we get statistics and number of contracts signed.
More providers should look at their customer base and find out how to provide more value to them – and plan around that.
Two Zig Ziglar quotes for you: “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem.” and “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Planning is the key.
There is a distinction between Enterprise Telecom and SMB telecom. Knowing that distinction is significant. Most hype is for Enterprise, yet 99% of the market consists of SMB. 99%! The Enterprise Buyer is very different from the SMB Buyer who is very different from the very small business owner.
In an Enterprise sale, Mitch or Mary can’t derail a project because they are used to doing it with the paging system or the admin side car, but that happens often in small business.
Knowing your Buyer, the businesses that you serve, their pain and how you solve it are the very foundation of success.
Omni this, AI that, Agents, chatbots – all that is great if you serve lots of customers and can afford to displease a subset of them, but most of us aren’t the cable company. Most of us have less than 10K customers and want to keep them all happy! So a CX strategy of less human is better makes sense in pennies but not in long-term dollars.
Today, yet another technician was at the house to fix another appliance. Again the technician has a mobile device and begins the appointment with a text and a link to track the driver arriving. Then photos of the appliance and everything on the mobile device – for appliance repair, air conditioning and others. How is your cloud comms system improving on that scenario?
It can’t because most of the activity is all done on the service platform – the notification, tracking, photos, work order, appointment setting, invoicing and payment. So during those years that I was advocating for integration into SMB software, the software vendors did what ServiceNow and Freshworks did: added the comms pieces itself.
We aren’t selling voice or phone systems, we are selling software.
Unfortunately, the softswitch vendors have all given up – Metaswitch, Broadsoft, et al. Other players that understood that they were software, built out a ton of capabilities that precisely benefit the business they were designed for.
You can sell POTS replacement, PBX replacement, digital voice, and SIP trunks, but I think a majority of the market will go to SMB software packages, some of that powered by a CPaaS player for the voice, SMS, email, and notifications. That is what Weave is: a software package that schedules, verifies insurance, accepts payment and notifies customers. Voice is just a small piece of that bundle. Those 4 parts are what businesses are buying: BPI – Business Process Improvement for small business.
Talking about AI to reduce the call center or AI to help write marketing material or improve CX is all pie in the sky stuff for Enterprises to buy. 99% of the market is looking for ways to do business more productively, without fumbling with tech or needing a team of geeks to keep it working.
Small business doesn’t have an IT team. Small business doesn’t have the time or money to do a POC on AI. They need out of the box solutions that work reliably. That seems to be forgotten in the Me-Too, AI hype cycle. But then if you are a public company or looking for investors, the hype cycle is required. That hype does NOT have to be the story that sales tells prospects though. That story should be about how your system will decrease no-show appointments by 10% or increase productivity on some part of their business.
Get back to basics. Solve pain/problems for small business.