As the Director of Sales & Marketing at Telizent I’m often asked to evaluate the ROI of our various marketing programs and make recommendations for future spending. Over time it has become evident that SuperMedia has consistently outperformed many of our other marketing channels and as a result we have steadily increased our SuperMedia budget over the past 5 years. Our annual SuperMedia spend is exceed by a single month of revenue generated from just one or two of our larger wins each year. Although total return on investment changes every month we continue to service each customer, it’s in the hundreds-of percent return on our SuperMedia advertising investment.

We hear a lot of negative things about internet yellow pages these days but based off of our experience if you invest in the right places with targeted campaigns you can still reap a significant ROI. If you are a start-up company with a small marketing budget this may be the answer to gaining immediate visibility in your industry. Once you start generating revenue from these paid advertising campaigns you can begin to allocate more of your budget to optimizing your website for organic search.

We have taken a similar approach at Telizent and although organic search now results in many of our larger wins we have continued to see a consistent return on our SuperMedia investment.

What’s your experience with internet yellow page advertising and how does it compare with your other marketing channels? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

A friend of mine who used to work at Gartner invited me to attend an event hosted by the Colorado Chapter of Society for Information Management. At first I was a bit hesitant to accept the invitation because I was not familiar with SIM Colorado and I was afraid it might just be another sales "networking" event. After doing a little research, however, I discovered that there are SIM chapters around the world that consist of information technology experts, including CIO’s, CTO’s and emerging IT leaders. Their mission is to help develop the next generation of effective IT leaders by establishing a forum to bring together IT professionals from across industries.

Suffice to say, my friend convinced me to attend the event and I found it to be very valuable and enjoyable. However, when the key note speaker announced what the "ice breaker" activity was going to be to kick off the evening, several of us looked at each other in shock and considered sneaking out the back door. You’ve heard of "Speed Dating"… well we were asked to introduce ourselves to 6 different individuals and spend only 2 minutes clearly describing who we were and what we do for our companies! They called it "Speed Networking"!

After all the groaning and moaning around the room subsided, we began the terrifying activity of talking (and intently listening) to one another… and I’m happy to say everybody survived the ordeal. What this forced each of us to do was to convey who we are and what we do as IT leaders in words that are not laced with techno-jargon, but are easy to understand by anyone. By the 6th person, most of us felt pretty good about how we could summarize what we do in a way that was both concise and interesting… what many refer to as your elevator pitch. Here is what mine ended up sounding like:

"At Telizent Communications, we help companies proactively monitor and maintain their business telephone systems. Just like regular medical checkups help prevent heart attacks, our proactive health checks help prevent telephone systems from having major outages by alerting us of symptoms before major problems occur. Telizent can always revive a downed phone system after the fact, but consider the impact that an outage can have on your company financially as a result of lost sales, or on your reputation due to poor customer service, or even on your employee safety due to them being unreachable on the phone. As CTO, my role is to architect and manage our proactive monitoring and maintenance SaaS toolset that we call Monitor+.  It is designed to prevent telephone system outages."

I had the privilege of meeting IT leaders from Microsoft, Frontier Airlines, Great West Life and many other prominent companies and state agencies in Colorado, and the "elevator pitch" that I had finally come up with above actually made the conversations with each of them even more valuable. So how about your elevator pitch? Are you ready as an IT Leader to convey what your company does in a way that most anyone could understand? I’m not sure I did a great job with my pitch above, but I can tell you that it has helped reduce my fumbling for words to describe what we do at Telizent Communications.

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This post was inspired by a September 8, 2009 InfoWorld article titled Dirty Vendor Tricks. The article talks about unscrupulous software vendors and mentions six dirty tricks they employed to separate you from hard earned company funds. The six dirty tricks listed in the article are as follows:

1. The Magic Demo – a canned demo that does magical things but doesn’t actually represent what the vendor can deliver

2. Underbid, then Overcharge – pretty self-explanatory

3. The Customer Headlock – once some vendors have you as a customer they will do anything to keep you, even if it crosses unethical lines

4. The Billing Mistake – billing you for services never rendered, or for more than you contracted

5. The Forced Upgrade March – requiring costly upgrades to keep you current even when what you purchased is relatively new

6. The Clueless Customer – This isn’t really a dirty trick, but is what happens when the customer puts too much trust in their vendors

If you’d like to read some of the specific horror stories that help drive their point, you can find the article here.

After reading the article I had two thoughts. My first thought was caveat emptor, buyer beware. It’s unfortunate that there are people and companies in this world that are more concerned about collecting money by any means than by acting with integrity.

However unfortunate this business model is, it is a reality of doing business and the customer must take the responsibility to ensure that they aren’t being taken advantage. This means taking the time to read the fine print of contracts and agreements as well as making sure that expectations, exceptions and assumptions are clearly communicated in writing. The larger the project in terms of business impact or cost, the greater the requirement to have a clear, written contract that can be reviewed by both parties. Ask your vendor to provide written expectations, exceptions and assumptions before you accept the terms of an agreement or give your authorization to allow work to begin. It can be as simple as a several line email or as complex as a multi-page document. It’s amazing the clarity that such a practice provides for both client and vendor and can save both parties time and money.

The second thought I had was that it really helps to know as much as you can about the companies you’re doing business with. I realize this thought seems a bit obvious, but it is often overlooked. Ask for referrals and actually talk with the reference accounts. Ask questions like, “Did their invoice match their proposal and if not why?” or “Was the level of service delivered equal to their promises?” If a company you’re doing business with treats a previous client unscrupulously what makes you think that it would be different for you?

Don’t take me wrong, I don’t believe all or even most businesses behave poorly. The vast majority of firms conduct business in a professional manner and try to take care of their customers. It only takes one unscrupulous vendor, though, to put your own firm in jeopardy. Take the time to read the contract and get a clear, documented understanding of what products and services you are contracting. In the long run, the enhanced clarity will improve the client-vendor relationship.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you found it useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

One of John Locke’s better known contributions to political theory of the 17^th century was the Social Contract. The concept is that of men willingly giving up some individual liberty in order to form a state that would act on behalf of the people for the common good, e.g. protection from within and outside the state.

There is a parallel social contract between telecommunication systems manufacturers and its customers. To understand the social contract for a technical (IT leader) or economic (CFO) buyer of telecommunication equipment consider the following:

• The manufacturer invests billions of dollars in software and hardware R & D and sells the systems below the true cost of developing, selling and installation. The general economics are that most new systems are sold at a loss in order to gain the longer term, more profitable relationship of an overpriced, manufacture -based maintenance contract.
• The break-even period is about three and a half years. In other words, it takes two and a half years AFTER the warranty period for the manufacturer to break-even on the equipment sale.
• Most technical and economic decision makers agree to continue paying for manufacturer-based maintenance because the maintenance contract pays for ongoing enhancements, typically in the form of tactical software service patches.
• The social contract is formed when you agree to over pay for high margin maintenance because your company might benefit from ongoing R & D performed by the manufacturer. The parallel is that you give up some personal liberty (how to more frugally obtain telecom maintenance) in return for protection of your telecom asset.

The parallel to Locke’s social contract is that your company can always invest in new technology from your current telecom solution provider, whether you continue to be a maintenance customer or not. Most manufacturers reward loyal customers with upgrade incentives. Often times you can do just as well, or better, through savvy procurement techniques.

SO WHAT?

The question for the reader is this: Are you 5+ years past the warranty period on your telecom platform? If so, this may or may not make economic sense. Below is a case for each:

1. Makes Economic Sense: Your telecom solutions partner continues to be delivering value-added enhancements on your current platform. You are unlikely to move to a different telecom solutions provider. Therefore, it makes sense to continue funding ongoing development into your current and future product set by voluntarily paying a premium for a manufacture-based maintenance Contract.

2. Does not make Economic Sense: Your current platform is dead-ended. The last service patch was installed 4 years ago. No further enhancements are being made. You are therefore funding the manufacturers’ R & D with no benefit likely to be realized by your firm, especially if your plans are to move to an entirely new platform. You may even be funding your competitor’s competitive edge, to take this line of reasoning another step.

Conclusion:

The traditional default decision to play nice with the telecom manufacturer in terms of investing in a solid telecom solutions platform and remaining on manufacturer-based maintenance needs to be closely scrutinized, especially in today’s market. Maintenance contracts are the cash cows for telecom solutions providers. Your firm benefits in the long run if you have access to more economical future patch releases. But, if you are living on borrowed time in terms of extending the life of your PBX and call center platforms, a strong business case can be made that you should divert the premium maintenance fees being paid in to a savings account for the telecom platform in your future.

What are your thoughts on telecom manufacturers’ maintenance contracts? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

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My neighbor works for a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate and he grumbles because his only choice for a mobile device is a BlackBerry and they require him to use Lotus Notes. In contrast, at Telizent Communications, our leadership team alone uses no less than 5 different mobile operating systems (iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm and Nextel) and they run on 3 different carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint)! We have standardized on Microsoft Exchange and Skype in our organization because both applications run seamlessly on each of our mobile devices, as well as on our Windows and Mac OS PC platforms.

While standards help organizations leverage economies of scale and reduce overall usage costs, IT groups within large companies are realizing that the “one-size-fits-all” mentality is no longer acceptable.

It seems that every day a new article is published about which carriers have the best networks, which mobile devices have the best user interface, or what mobile applications have the most downloads. Of these three areas, which do you believe is most important?

Though I don’t use an iPhone personally, I have to take my hat off to Apple with regard to their now famous slogan “There’s an app for that”. I too believe that the mobile application is the most important piece to the mobility movement, especially if it runs on multiple mobile platforms. Network World’s Mitchell Ashley, refers to these mobile apps as “micro apps” – a narrow, targeted, mobile app that performs a specific task at the very moment you think of it or need it. Mitchell believes that users would rather download an app to perform a discrete tasks rather than searching for them in Google, navigating to the right website, and then having to use a website interface. I agree.

Do you support multiple mobile devices and/or applications within your organization? BlackBerry has been the dominant smart phone in corporations because of how well it has addressed security requirements; however they have limited apps for their users and are therefore at risk of losing market share. In fact, two highly regarded analysts think that Apple and Blackberry will be in the rearview mirror of both Android apps and Microsoft Mobile apps as early as 2012. Gartner believes that Android will grab the No. 2 position in market share in 2012 while iSuppi analyst Tina Teng predicts Windows Mobile will be the #2 OS in 2013.

What do you think? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

Why should you have remote access connectivity into your business telephone system? Simply put, remote access to your phone system is the fastest way to fix problems and return communication services to your business. Most problems experienced by business phone systems can be fixed remotely, but even if there has been an electronics failure and a card or board has to be replaced, remote access allows the phone system service provider to better determine the cause of the problem and arrive with the correct part. This decreases the onsite repair time and the number of return visits.

While supporting our PBX maintenance clients around the country, we’re often asked if the client really needs to have remote access available for their phone system. What does this mean? Most PBX phone systems have the ability to install a modem, either internal to the phone system or an external unit connected to a serial port. Newer IP PBX systems can be connected to the company’s intranet and a VPN connection established to a trusted maintenance service provider.

Sometimes a modem for the phone system is an included option when the system is purchased. Modem access is the simplest to get working and once it is setup it just needs a working POTS (plain old telephone service) line connection to have dial-up access to the PBX phone system. VPN access is often faster to use (data rate) and more reliable than modem access, but is more involved to setup and get working.

Are there security concerns with providing remote access to your telephone system? The short answer is yes. Modem access is much more straightforward to setup and nearly all phone systems that support modem connectivity will prompt the modem caller for a username and password before allowing access to the phone system. There are even secure modems available (more costly then a regular modem) that add another layer of username and password security and hang up the phone line if an incorrect username or password are entered. There is also the option of leaving the phone line disconnected from the modem until there is a problem and connecting it after you’ve contacted you maintenance provider. However, as simple as this seems it means that when you have a problem (even after hours) someone from your business needs to travel to the phone system’s location to connect the phone line to the modem. Also, many phone systems can reactively call your maintenance provider to report a problem if the maintenance provider has a monitoring system (this topic is a future post) and that wouldn’t work if the phone line is left disconnected until needed.

Security is something all businesses must consider in today’s hacker happy computer society. However, there is much that can be done to protect your businesses data security and the security of your phone system. First, VPN access is designed to be secure; the way it works is a secure encrypted tunnel is established between two organizations over the Internet between firewalls. There are two caveats with VPN access. The first caveat is that it requires software and sometimes hardware to make it work. Second caveat is that VPNs are a bit complex to setup and it will require the involvement of an IT person who understands how to configure a VPN and how to make changes to your company firewall.

The benefits of enabling remote access to your phone system outweigh the risks. Remote access decreases the amount of time your phone system is down and improves reliability. Remote access also decreases the number of onsite service calls and the parts required to repair your system. Remote telephony access makes good business sense.

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