Easily Deepen Your Wallet-share With Redundancy, Circuit Monitoring, and Firewall Questions.
I attend a lot of conventions and events that feature cloud voice and infrastructure providers. From circuit monitoring to voice conferencing, I believe I have heard a thousand sales pitches. Often I hear about a product, and I think, “That is super cool – I need to write a blog about how that product can improve OUR pitch.”
This has happened frequently over the past year, so I’ve decided to write them all down for my partners as well as future agents of Telarus. The list of questions is extensive, so I split them into four posts. Each post shares pertinent questions that aim at easily deepening your wallet-share.
Enjoy.
1. Redundant Connectivity
I’m deeply concerned about the lack of backup that accompanies the bandwidth sold by the agent community. As customers become more and more dependent on their internet service providers to access key apps and information, a redundant connection to the internet is necessary for all businesses. Please ask your customers about their backup solution. If they do not have one, you may turn one order into two.
When you talk about redundancy, make sure to locate your customers’ geographically diverse paths into their office, e.g. coax + fiber, or T1 + coax, or fiber + satellite, etc. You can also have fiber + fiber if they come in on two distinct strands (the free Telarus iPhone app will show you this). The cardinal sin in redundancy is to have two different providers reselling/using the same physical wire (e.g. CenturyLink + CenturyLink reseller). Remember, you don’t necessarily need to be provider redundant, just access redundant.
For wireless redundancy, Exede (powered by ViaSat) has created a special product (under $60/month, available anywhere in the US) that’s made to sit in inactive mode until you need it. If you’re close to civilization, you can get a 4G wireless backup in the range of $20-$30/month.
The sales pitch for redundancy is pretty simple: The cost for a redundant circuit isn’t the cost of more high-speed internet–it’s the price of worker productivity insurance. Most companies spend 80 to 90 percent of their overhead on human capital, and people need internet access to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. Plus, you’ll be supported by Eric Stark: The hardest working man in telecom.
2. Circuit Monitoring
Adding circuit monitoring to orders is by far the easiest thing to sell on this list because circuit monitoring is free when you place your circuit orders through Telarus as your cloud services distributor (master agent). The free service includes up/down warnings and alerts, 90-day ping/trace-route history, and access to real-time reports.
The free circuit monitoring is a terrific first hook for clients interested in learning more about the performance of the circuits you’re selling. Soon they’ll ask you how close they are to saturation and which websites take up the most bandwidth. You CAN offer this too, for a small monthly fee.VXPulse costs $50 per site and $10 per IP address (device). It provides customers a full dashboard of everything taking place on their connection, and it’s all 100 percent commissionable to you through Telarus.
3. Cloud-Based Firewall
As co-founder of Telarus, there are two things that keep me up at night: My competition and hackers. I can manage the competition through foresight, research, and constant communication with my sales partners and suppliers. Hackers, on the other hand, are like sharks in the ocean. You can’t see them from the surface, but you know they’re there, lurking, waiting for the opportunity for an easy meal.
At the most recent Telarus Innovation Conference in San Jose, California, I was talking to Kristy Thomas, VP of Cloud for Masergy. She told me about Global DataGuard, the security company Masergy recently purchased to enable to them protect customers using systems with artificial intelligence (Adaptive Network Behavior Analysis). In the past, intruders could penetrate a system and slowly send packets of sensitive information back to the hacker, but at a rate that was so slow, it got lost in the normal course of business.
Now, with the help of Global DataGuard, Masergy is discovering these breaches by analyzing both the inbound AND outbound traffic. The best part for agents is this service can be layered on top of customers’ existing networks, meaning they don’t have to be a Masergy network customer to benefit from this service.
Next time you’re in front of your customer, please ask them about how they plan to handle a hacker who successfully compromises their network. Security is the currency of the future, and Masergy (who will also help you close the deal for free) is their best bet to keep the bad guys out.
Ask these questions to your future sales conversations:
What is your redundancy plan?
Would you like me to add free circuit monitoring to all of your circuits?
What is your plan to handle a hacker who successfully compromises your network?
Once you add these three questions to your sales conversations, let me know the responses. I bet I will see some new Exede orders, Global DataGuard inquiries, and additional IP addresses added to circuit monitoring.
