About A Players and A Managers

Good blog from Ben about "A" players (top talent).

"As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hired her, will she stay world-class? If she doesn’t, will she become world-class again?"

The blog talks about ways to determine top talent. But the CEO and the rest of teh C-Suite have to (1) be A Players themselves; and (2) more importantly, be good managers.

What makes a good manager? Well, Don't Micro-Manage. (That won't scale). Managers remove obstacles so A Players can perform at their best.

"Finally, what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you 10X your company, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sales people, finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority."

Reminder: tell your current employees that they are A Players, too! Or they will work in fear and perform at their worst.

A Gift for Your Customers

Sophos has a bunch of free security tools that you can give to your clients (to make your life easier!)

What the Wireline Stars are Doing

I don’t agree with all the picks but here are the highlights of the Wireline Stars of 2013:

Lumos: "One of the biggest initiatives Drinkhall is driving this year is the telco's "edging out" network expansion strategy, one that includes the buildout of 100G optical wavelength routes connecting Richmond to Ashburn and Lynchburg in Virginia."

“Complementing the ongoing network buildouts are a growing set of new services, including colocation, Ethernet, fiber to the tower (FTT), and hosted VoIP services.” Notice that every company has had to add numerous services to keep revenue growing. What services have you added in the last year?

Even Sprint has reinvigorated its wireline shop with IAAS and Cloud services – none of it in-house! All of it through strategic partnerships. Note that.

For Google, it isn’t about a 1 GB Fiber-to-the-home network, it is WHAT can you do with that network! Tele-medicine is high on the list, especially considering that the population is getting older and older.

How are you utilizing wireline to crush it?

8 Links to Look at

Lost arts like presenting and productivity: by Nicholas Bate.

Some great advice from Entrepreneurs, including "Keeping in contact with clients is the most important thing"

"Top managers realize their core objective is: make my people more valuable vs. focusing on the numbers. The BYPRODUCT: They hit BIGGER goals." - Keith Rosen

5 Pricing Studies - like Comparisons or Selling Time Over Money. Worth the read!

Comparison of broadband pricing.

9 things that block cloud sales

""Hardware OEMs are increasingly turning to service partners to access the customers, at the same time that independent software vendors are using the SaaS model to go to the customer directly," she said. "This is bad news for VARs, integrators and distributors, many of whom are trying to either become cloud service providers themselves or move into a cloud brokerage model."

. The cloud threat.

Cbeyond rolled out TotalCloud and TotalAssist and Cloud Enablement. What is that?

Cloud Computing: Revolving The Business Industry And The Working Environment

10 rules for a great small business (they call it start-up, but I say it works for any small business.)

What is WebRTC?

The new cool thing in telecom is WebRTC.

"WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a media engine and set of APIs (free and openly available at webrtc.org) that bestows upon web browsers Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities—particularly low-cost, high-quality, voice and video services and P2P file sharing." [WebRTC for Dummies]

Another good article that explains it is here. Basically, WebRTC uses browsers and java script to enable real-time collaboration.

Two Ways to Go-to-Market

There are two ways to go to market: Find Customers for your services, which is the hard way. This is the one with high customer acquisition costs. This is the path that requires marketing and sales people.

In the early days of dial-up (1993-1998), it was the other way: find products for your customers. You had a service that was unavailable in your area that people wanted to buy.

The noise level was low back then. The number of competitors was low back then. Advertising was expensive but there were a limited number of avenues to advertise on (billboards, radio, TV, yellow pages, direct mail).

Today, the noise is awful. People have been trained to ignore almost everything.

Advertising is still expensive but there are way more avenues now, considering the online marketing landscape and the offline tactics.

Back then, with dial-up and, for the early birds, with DSL, you had Products for your Customers.

Today, do you even bother? Are you stuck in the mud of anger because dial-up was so easy? DSL was a little harder but in the early days it was still like dial-up -- easy and profitable.

Then in 2005 after Brand-X changed the regulatory and the resulting wholesale market, you did one of two things: you became EarthLink or NetZero.

The NetZero approach was to sell on price and not add any new products; not try anything new. Ride it out.

NetZero did use that pile of dial-up money to buy other properties like FTD, but even at that point they stopped and rode it out. Now, they are spinning off FTD because the other brands including NetZero are mostly declining or dead.

EarthLink tried a lot of stuff - muni wireless, cable, voice, CLEC, cellular (Helio). Not all of it worked. Some of it they executed poorly. But today that dial-up ISP is a billion dollar company. Of the $320 million in quarterly revenue, 77% was business services revenue at $247.8 million. That consumer business is still over $70M.

You need to talk to your customers, find out what they want, what they need. Then figure out what you can offer, what you can actually sell, bundle it and get it to market.

4 Factors of Network Security

There are 4 factors in network security:

1. Authentication, 
2. Privacy, 
3. Software security, 
4. Network/system availability

The fifth might be the social engineering.

UPDATE:

Security lessons from the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Report

Try Breathing

I was reminded today to breathe. It was a good suggestion. Nothing like breathing (and maybe some exercise) to relieve the stress from work.

So stand up (right now), stretch, breathe, drink more water.

Selling Cloud Services: Live Class

Just scheduled a live, interactive class in Atlanta for Monday, July 22, 2013.

Selling Cloud Services will be a three and one-half hour interactive dive into the sales process, discovery, and the mindset of both the buyer and seller.

The VIP ticket comes with not just a paperback copy of my book but a money back guarantee! At the end, if you don't think it was worth it, tell me and I will refund your money.

Space is very limited - just 14 seats! Very interactive this way. I just did something very similar for a very large CLEC in California and the team enjoyed the format.

Look what one attendee had to say:

"Peter Radizeski has the unique ability to communicate his message with extreme clarity. I’ve had the opportunity to hear several presentations, and each time I walk away with an action plan. From strategic planning to building culture, his delivery motivates the audience to produce results. Many speakers can inspire, very few leave the audience with a working plan that produces tangible results. Every presentation has been well researched and contains the most current examples and information available." - Clay Colvin, Georgia Business Net, Inc.

You better grab one of the seats NOW!

Isn't Change Just Growth?

This is from a blog I enjoy reading:

"Change isn't hard. We humans love change: it's known as growing."

Contrary to that, Mark Sanborn said that Status Quo is Death. Status Quo by definition is Static. Life passes you by if you are static. So don't embrace the status quo -- at any second, life can pass you by.

Change is scary, but that's growth.

The hard part is to get over the fear. (You know Anxiety is just worry about the future?) You have done it before, but you were excited and passionate and ignored the fear, the anxiety, the lizard brain. You can do it again. You just need to find the passion again.

Not Enough Businesses

I hear this a lot: "You don't understand. There aren't that many businesses in my area." Really? Do you have a yellow pages? How about a chamber of commerce? A Rotary club? Then you have plenty of business -- you just aren't prospecting enough (or correctly).

This is originally from the FreedomIQ blog, but it can apply anywhere.

According to the 2010 Census data there are 5.9 million businesses in the USA that have payroll (or paid employees). There are 21 Million businesses that do not have payroll - solopreneurs, network marketers, etc. Pretty amazing stats.

So I decided to focus on San Diego County, home of FreedomVoice. Did you know that the SBA has a district office in San Diego?

Did you know that 30K small businesses sought help from the SBA in San Diego in 2011? That means that there are 30,000 prospects!

Nearly 95 percent of businesses in San Diego County are small businesses. The average number of workers employed by San Diego County small businesses is 7.3, but the range in size is wide. Only one in six are “mom and pop” operations, having just one or two employees. One-third currently have more than 10 workers on the payroll. That is the FreedomIQ Target Market!!!!

The largest category (or business vertical) is the business services group. One out of every five firms is in this segment, which includes engineering, consulting, accounting, research and management firms, according to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

Want a National Accounts list? Just look at the SD Chamber Board of Directors! I tell salespeople to have a Prospect Top 20 and stalk those people. Well, between social media and the Chamber it is easy to get to these top prospects.

The headquarters of FreedomVoice is in Encinitas, CA. Encinitas has almost 1800 small business - just 10% of that is still a good business.

VZ is Clipping Copper for LTE

In a local paper, "Devastated and wiped out by superstorm Sandy, Verizon has no plans to rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking (NJ)." VZ landline is giving up to be replaced by VZW services.

What happened to carrier of last resort?

Why would VZ give up revenues to VZW that it has to share with Vodafone?

The union must be standing around with its mouth agape.

Regulators? What regulators?

VoiceLink was the plan all along. Super storm Sandy just gave them an excuse.

My question: How can VZW be whining to the FCC about lack of spectrum, when they are shutting down copper and replacing it with wireless IF they are out of spectrum????

So now LTE becomes fixed wireless replace of POTS.

Do you hear that? It's the sound of copper being clipped.

Are You on LinkedIn?

Are you on LinkedIn? Are we connected?

Is your profile complete including a picture of you?

Have you filled out a company page? It is a good place to link PR.

Do you belong to any groups for networking, prospecting or knowledge?

This is a good view of LinkedIn:

How LinkedIn is Transforming Businesses from LinkedIn

Thoughts on Culture

I gave the keynote at FISPA today on Culture. (slides are below)

"It's so easy to string together a bunch of platitudes and call them a mission statement. But what happens if you actually have a specific mission, a culture in mind, a manifesto for your actions?" from my favorite Seth Godin.

Culture has been at the center of a lot of projects in the last year, because transformation into cloud services, branding, product launches, and especially hiring come down to culture. Culture is the DNA -- it is how things really get done in an organization (not how it is written in policy, but how things actually work.)

For example, if honesty and integrity are in your job description, but you cheat in sales, then you should be fired. Not firing you when caught cheating means that honesty and integrity are not valued - and that is the true culture of the company. For too many companies, the true culture is just revenue. Not many people can feel valued in that environment.

The slide deck with a lot of borrowed content.

By the way, I had some slides that I was going to show before my talk during lunch but didn't. Here they are.