Author: Dave Gilbert
Let’s imagine that you go shopping for an automobile, and you’re looking for something with four doors and decent mileage nothing special. What if amongst all of the $35,000 mid-sized cars and $28,000 compact cars you find one priced for $7000, brand-new and fully loaded. That seems too to be true doesn’t it? You might be immediately suspect of this low-priced car, and even if you bothered to look at it, in your mind something would always be wrong. This phenomena is known as perceived value. This is when we expect a product to have a certain price range because…
Elka Popova is the Vice President and Senior Fellow, Information and Communications Technologies at Frost & Sullivan who brings years of experience and, probably best of all, humility, as she and Dave talk about building and growing a business, pivoting based on life experience, and the type of moral framework that can be used as a guide to life, business, and everything in between. Topics: Cloud tools, integrating applications and voice.Life advice learned from years in business.The perils of rapid growth, and how to balance expansion and sustainability to uneasy investors.Creative thinking in your response to crises. Take a listen, and let us…
Kevin Nethercott, CCO, and Veena Vadgama VP of Marketing at Telestax join Dave Gilbert on this podcast about their experience with sales, growth, and business strategy. Topics: How to stand up to larger competitors in order to win business.CPaaS enablement strategy, helping other service providers.Utilizing specific and targeted education in order to enable better sales through your agents and partners. Take a listen, and let us know what you think.
Within a call center queue there exists the opportunity to tailor your messaging for best impact. Entrance messages, Messages on hold, and Comfort messages are the three main areas of concern. We will explore these three sections and offer advice on how to maximize the impact of these messages. Entrance Messages These are the messages that are played before the call is placed on hold when entering the queue. They can be mandatory, and always played even if no other calls are in queue, or they can be optional and play only if the call will go into hold. Legal…
Dave Gilbert has a lot of connections, and these enable him to have great conversations with tremendously influential people. Mark Morgan is the President of Intelisys, and brings a lot of perspective to the conversation about master agent and agent sales. This interview, from the floor of a trade show, delves into the thoughts of a prominent mind in the UC industry, his outlook on leadership, emerging markets, and growth potential. Topics: What being named Intelisys’ President means to Mark.Moving from a CapEx to OpEx business model.The growth potential for UCaaS and Cloud Contact Center in today’s market.Building customer stickiness as a…
I had a chance to sat down with Crisantos Hajirahim of Prodoscore (and occasional collaborator with the UCBuyer) and ask some questions about how to sell backward. Crisantos begins as he does with a lot of his business clients, “we are all moving to the cloud, but we don’t know why we are doing it.” Recent acquisitions in the industry proves that data is king. A great example is how Moneyball used data to build a winning baseball team. “Why don’t we apply the same logic?” Related Blog: Using Data to Improve Adoption Selling backwards means looking at the end result, then planning a path in order to get…
You may have set up a hasty home office due to sudden and unexpected work-from-home orders. Working from the kitchen table, using virtual backgrounds to hide your virtual learning children, might have been good enough for a couple months. As more businesses resume normal conditions, many offices are finding benefits in having a good percentage of their staff as remote workers. Even some, like Twitter and Square are deciding to keep work from home as an option even after COVID-19. So, if you decide to continue to work from home, it might benefit you to take a few steps to make sure you…
Although I’ve been a big fan of video conferencing for more than a decade I’ve been in more video conferencing meetings over the last eight weeks than ever before. Now that nearly all of us currently have a “stay at home” order we’ve been forced to change from working in office space to working in virtual space. We are turning to video technology to continue our lives and livelihood. Video conferencing is not just a business tool. It has also become a way to stay personally connected. Over these last few weeks I’ve been a virtual participant at parties, classes,…
In the past month the whole world has been rocked by the COVID-19 Coronavirus. The FUD, (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is in the air. But that’s not to say we should not take this crisis seriously. In the past week the entire country of Italy was quarantined, The largest trade show in communications world was postponed the NCAA National Championship is canceled, Costco has been out of water and toilet paper for weeks as people build up their emergency supplies. This week they even postponed the Stagecoach and Coachella concerts. Employees are being told that any “non-essential travel” will not be allowed and that workers should work…
On the surface, contact centers seem to evoke an image of a very specific deployment. Rows of cubicles, with telephone operators chained by their headsets to their workstation. Processing payments, answering customer service inquiries, or providing technical support by following a script, these agents provide a specific service to a specific caller. To be sure, this is a common application. But, as we will show you in this article, there are many other uses for the technology. What is a Contact Center, really? When you boil it down to its core, a contact center is very similar to a hunt…
Just a few years ago, cloud based communications were great for early adopters, those who are prepared for a few hiccups – but lots of jitter, shock, and dropped calls made it really difficult to talk everyday people and businesses into trusting the cloud. Clark Peterson, board member of Cloud Communication Alliance, recalls, “we were we were out there trying to convince people, why would you ever trust anybody that brand you haven’t heard?” What has Changed? It has been a decade, and the over the top services that support cloud products has improved greatly, both in terms of capacity and accessibility.…
Most often, people think of call queues and call centers as something that does a very specific thing. Frequently, this very specific thing is “handle a lot of incoming calls and direct them to a lot of agents”. While many call centers fall into that definition, a cloud based PBX can offer other solutions for call queues that you might not have considered.Essentially, a call queue operates like an advanced hunt group, taking an inbound call and keeping the call on-hold until one of the available agents listed is ready to take the call. Good ones do a great job…
At the CompTIA show in Las Vegas, I caught up with Harry Brelsford of 420MSP, which specializes in finding opportunities for emerging markets. Harry is an absolute pro at this, marrying business and technology, using analytics, and scoping out those opportunities as they arise. I wanted to get some insight as to his secrets, and he told me about his latest venture – Cannabis Managed Service Provider. Related Blog: What the CompTIA Show Means for MSPs The legality of cannabis as a recreational product has followed its legalization for medicinal use. In fact, as of the writing of this article, it is fully legal…
At the 2019 Comptia show in Las Vegas, I had a chance to catch Rory Jackson, IT Consultant at Syber Networks to talk about CompTIA and what it brings for Managed Service Providers. CompTIA excels at building a spirit of cooperation, which is no surprise considering the array of products they offer. Rory appreciates the networking opportunities he gets at this show, “they’ve helped me immensely just on the sheer fact of the networking with everyone else around you.” The CompTIA shows “are a huge collaboration event on multiple levels.” This resolves into a single word, according to Rory, “Learning”. With the…
SD-WAN is changing the world for the average customer with its software defined approach and integrated QoS features. But I am always interested to see how successful companies use this market trend to their advantage. Related Blog: Managers Create Their Own Private Internet with SD-WAN At the Comptia Show in Las Vegas, I had a chance to talk with Aaron Kaffen, the VP of Marketing for Bigleaf Networks. They have differentiated themselves when it comes to SD-WAN deployments with their specially designed platform, which, according to Aaron, “is designed specifically for the needs of customers like [the ones] MSPs run into: smaller businesses or…
For providers of software “fill in the blank” as a Service, accounting for monthly recurring charges becomes their lifeblood. But these subscription services may actually reduce the overall profit margin, due to increased bookkeeping, oversight for customer retention (not to mention staying atop of late charges), and the sheer bulk of producing accurate bills every month. One might even say, as Michael Cromwell as put it, “billing is the one thing I’ve seen be the bane of some customers existence.” Is there some solution? According to Brent Maropis from Rev.io, “with flexibility and openness comes complexity of managing it.” Rev.io delivers a usage-based billing platform…
According to IDC, enterprise spend on Communication Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) is forecast to grow from $2 billion in 2017 to $10.9 billion by 2022. When you consider the ease of deployment, custom solutions, and cost-savings, it’s easy to understand why so many companies are looking at CPaaS to improve their business communications. With the integration of APIs, companies can configure their own real-time communication and collaboration solutions without building their own backend infrastructure. With CPaaS , make it easy to integrate communications applications ( API’s) into existing business SaaS software such as CRM, purchasing, billing, and trouble ticket management systems,…
At the 2019 Channel Partner Conference and Expo, we had a chance to speak with Andrew Pryfogle, Sales and Thought Leader on Cloud Service and Customer Experience at Intelisys. He was kind enough to share some of his insights with us. Andrew has these thoughts about driving development toward customer experience, “You’ve got to do [WAN Transformation] with the right network design. You gotta do it with the right security posture because if you if you fail in any of those it doesn’t matter [how much] we’ve spent on UC and CC. Right? Customer Experience suffers and your brand suffers because of…
At the 2019 Channel Partner Conference and Expo, we had a chance to speak with Andrew Pryfogle, Sales and Thought Leader on Cloud Service and Customer Experience at Intelisys. He was kind enough to share some of his insights with us. Digital Transformation “Companies across all different industries have been talking about digital transformation for a few years,” says Andrew, and we couldn’t agree more. According to i-Scoop, digital transformation is “the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized…
If your catalog is large enough, you can possibly have a product that will work for a customer even if it is not your headline offering. These wedge products can get your foot in the door to establish your business as the go-to resource for future offerings. This article will provide advice for carrying, promoting, and selling wedge products. Product Catalog The portfolio of products that your company offers should augment and enhance the experience provided by your flagship products. For example, if you are offering Unified Communications as a Service, you should also offer the things that can enhance…