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agents. We will still distribute and
support Star2Star, Vonage and Fonal-
ity, among others, through our sales
engineers and help desk teams.
We still expect to grow the mas-
ter agent hosted products business
into a $2 million-per-year business
in a few years, like we did our
cableco business with Comcast,
Spectrum and others. But we know
from our past experiences that our
agents and customers appreci-
ate the simplicity of Tel-IP hosted
service and the personnel support
they have become accustomed
to with our award winning service
department, pre-sales support and
higher commissions. We look for-
ward to more announcements as
we will be kicking off the product
after our Agent Council event in
Traverse City, Mich.
CV:
Do you see fresh
opportunities for channel
partners in today’s
market? Which are the
most important?
DR:
I think there are new oppor-
tunities for niche agents to get into
our business in the cloud space,
and for telecom expense manage-
ment (TEM) agencies in the mobil-
ity space. But the majority of new
opportunities will be in hosted PBX
space, as the marketplace appears
primed to take off. All the analyst
info says that hosted will explode
over the next few years. I also be-
lieve agents can still make a living
selling coax and fiber for access,
and selling hosted opportunities to
increase and sustain long-term re-
sidual checks.
CV:
Is the sales process
changing and if so, how?
DR:
The sales process is becom-
ing more specialized in my opinion,
and project management is becom-
ing more important for agents. For
those that don’t hire support teams
of their own, we provide assistance
in sales engineering and order fulfill-
ment. More and more, we are proj-
ect-managing network installations
with our agents and our pre- and
post-support teams.
CV:
What moves have
you made in terms of
modernizing to make
the most of the next-
generation of technology
demands?
DR:
We’ve made several moves
to increase our knowledge base.
We joined CompTIA, and invest in
their training programs for cloud
essentials, project management
and cyber-security training for our
sales engineers and order fulfill-
ment teams. Obviously, TelePortal
was a major investment for our
knowledge base for our agents and
internal employees. And Salesforce
is another major investment in soft-
ware to make our business mod-
ernized and in a position to scale. I
am fortunate to sit on the CompTIA
Distributor Advisory Board with a
few other master agents, and HP,
Microsoft and Ingram Micro execu-
tives, among others. We spend
a lot of time finding ways and
publishing research on the next
generation of technology demands
to help members of the industry
capitalize on new trends such as
managed service business models.
I’m fortunate to learn a lot from
other leaders and share that with
our channel support team members
to prepare for future opportunities.
CV:
What is your best
piece of advice for
channel partners going
forward?
DR:
“Remember that you are
in telecommunications sales for
the rest of your life!” The industry
is always changing and new op-
portunities will continue to present
themselves. I founded the busi-
ness in 1990 and have had fun
working on changing our business
models and becoming proficient at
selling the services that are trend-
ing and building a business.
The future sales arena will
change, but regardless of whether
it’s the TDM PRI days or the up-
coming IoT selling days, we will
be employed to keep helping our
customers master the use of tech-
nology to improve their business
and reduce costs as new services
replace the old ones. That is the
biggest challenge we all face, es-
pecially as the players in the indus-
try increase and we all enter other
sellers’ markets.
Voice & Internet. Mobility. Cable.
Cloud. Hosted PBX. Enterprise IT.
Managed Services. IoT. They are go-
ing to be around for a long time, so
change your model now to sell the IP
services of today and tomorrow.
Computer rendering of Telegration’s new HQ.
PROFILE
78
CHANNEL
VISION
|
July - August 2016