This Isn’t TDM Any More

How are the sales going on your IP services? How about hosted PBX (News - Alert)? I’ll bet you are selling SIP trunking – at a savings on regular PRI pricing, right? Nice. Lower the revenue while fixed costs remain about the same.

That SIP trunk could be a foot in the door to hosted PBX sales down the road. Maybe. If you can interop with their PBX. If the onboarding goes well. If you remember to follow up and stay in touch, so that you are around when the maintenance contract expires or the PBX hiccups.

Customer retention is a different silo than customer acquisition, so who at your company is going to be in charge of the upsell? What’s your follow-up routine look like? What do you do when you churn your sales team or let them all go because the numbers don’t work?

The numbers don’t often work for IP services or hosted PBX sales. Why? Because TDM salespeople by and large cannot sell IP-based services. SIP trunking is a PRI replacement. It is an order to be taken by your “salesperson”. Let me see your bill.... Ah, we have a cheaper solution for you.

How is that salesperson going to handle an upsell to hosted PBX from SIP trunk?

How do you even sell hosted PBX to the SMB space?

How do you sell virtualization, cloud, managed services, dedicated server?

This requires face-to-face selling with a trusted advisor, equipped with both product knowledge and sales skills. This sale is about asking pertinent open-ended questions and listening – about the business, the pains, the future. How does a salesperson provide a solution without the product knowledge? IP is all about data flow. With that is work flow – where is the work being done, where does it need to be retrieved?

Regulations, compliance, security, reliability, redundancy, access, back-up, storage, scalability, scope, mobility – all factors that must be taken into account.

Read the blog for follow up on this article. IT

Peter Radizeski is head of telecom consulting agency RAD-INFO (News - Alert) Inc. (http://rad-info.net/).

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