Tag Archives: telecommunications

What Startups Know That Managers Don’t

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Ensuring that you are well positioned to address the needs of the market, your customers, is a key element of business that your company to should continuously focusing on. Like it or not, technology is accelerating the continuous shift of customer preferences and expectations – even if you aren’t in a technology-based industry.

With the fast paced nature of today’s business world, how can you make sure that your team is aligned with the market? Thankfully, there are some basic fundamentals that can be easily implemented to ensure that you are always staying current with your customers’ demands.

List your assumptions - The best startups from Silicon Valley often list their biggest assumptions about the market to ensure that everyone is one the same page. These assumptions can be about the size of the market, potential customer segments, the nature of the problem that they are solving for these customers and how they can best reach them. It is important to get your team together regularly for straight-forward dialogues to surface and discuss the assumptions that your company as a whole holds about the customers you are serving.

Test your assumptions - Once you have listed your assumptions it is important to test them with real customers. While the tests do not have to be applied to the entire customer base of your company, take a statistically significant sample (usually 30 or more) and begin to verify whether or not your assumptions are tractable. The point is to find areas of adjustment in product offering or business processes to better serve your customers and keep an edge over your competition.

Create cheap experiments - Remember the scientific method from grade school? Your tests above should be following that outline to ensure an assumption can be verified as true or false. The point of testing assumptions with real customers is to create feedback loops about how the market behaves. Specifically, how it reacts to your brand and the solutions that you offer.

As mentioned before, the market is always shifting and if a company gets stuck in its ways for too long, it may find itself losing ground to new competitors. We recommend that you work with your team to engage in these types of activities regularly (monthly) to ensure that your “normal” business processes are actually making an impact for your bottom line.

Communications Strategy – Paving The Way To A Healthy Corporate Image | RDM Communications

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Creating a healthy corporate image is important. Yet, the process requires more than just writing a mission statement, listing a dozen “corporate values” and pasting this content on your company’s website.

Creating an effective communications strategy to convey a  powerful corporate image involves tightly articulating the synthesis of what your company accomplishes for its customers, how it accomplishes this and why you are doing it. Think about it, of all the businesses that you could have started, why did you start this one? The answer to this question is not easily arrived at, but once you get there you’ll find the core of your corporate image and an idea of how to communicate it.

Once you are ready to create a full communications, there’s a lot more to think about. You want the communications to be consistent and flexible so that anyone in your organization would be able to repeat it to a client or partner. Even better, this corporate image can ensure that your people are armed with the right perspective to make difficult judgment calls on their own.

The process of creating durable communications strategies – and communications plans – is an involved effort and will go through many different versions as you revise and hone your message.

We recommend taking a look at the Rethinking Business Communications blog as they have a thorough blog post on creating an end-to-end communications strategy for shaping a healthy corporate image. We’ve highlighted some key points below:

Write for everyone - Given that a communications strategy is both an internal and external document it is important to write with clarity and in plain english, leaving out jargon and statements that are hard to understand.

Have a “Worse case scenario” communications plan - Accidents and public mishaps will happen, so it is important to have a well thought out communications plan in place before the chaos starts. Obviously this plan should not be shared as much as the “regular” communications plan but it is important to have everyone within the organization familiar with it so that they can effectively uphold a healthy corporate identity as they engage with their own respective personal and professional communities.

Enable feedback loops to continuously improve - As the blog author puts it, the best communications plans are the ones that are “living”. This stress the importance of not writing a plan, crossing it off the list and putting it on the shelf to be pointed to conveniently in the future. It needs to be lived, both in the actions and behaviors of the company’s actors and updated through feedback as the company encounters new, unforeseen situations where its identity may be redefined or updated.

Read more about creating an effective communication strategy here.

Creating an Effective Lead Scoring Process

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As we have talked before, having an effective connection between your marketing tools and your telecommunications systems is the best way to leverage both systems. If telecommunications systems are the hardware that social media and sales meet, effective lead scoring is the software to make it happen.  The majority of businesses – big and small – dream of being flooded with leads. And why shouldn’t they? More leads offer more possibilities to close deals. However high-lead volume additionally has its downsides: Your best prospects might be falling through the cracks since your salespeople are scrambling to keep up with every single person.

Fortunately, lead scoring programs can easily help manage all that scrambling. They offer actionable scales for choosing when an opportunity that’s been fleshed out from your marketing efforts is sales-ready. Here’s some tips for starting your own effective lead scoring process.

1. Specify when an opportunity is sales-ready

To create an effective lead scoring program, start by choosing when an opportunity is sales-ready or by specifying the point at which social media marketing passes the prospect over to the Sales Team to close the deal. That point could be when the possibility is recognized or after people have responded to email campaigns, downloaded white papers, or taken other actions that propose they are ready to get.

2. Pick out option fit metrics and score them

Ask just what key questions will certainly help know if an option is a greatest match for your company and product or service. Think about such questions as: Is the lead in the right market? Is it the right kind of business? Is this person the decision-maker? Do they have the right kind of need or problem for our solution? Does our product or service remedy that problem?

Once you’ve identified those metrics, develop a scale for each one. Using a 1-10 scale is a great place to start – no need to overcomplicate things. A possibility with the specific issue that your organization solves could obtain a score of 10 for one metric, for instance. Or a secretary contact– instead of a CEO contact– could obtain a score of 3 for the decision-maker metric.

3. Choose possible behavior metrics and score them

Behaviors are observable actions that show where the prospect is in the purchasing process. To produce these metrics, very first map out your purchasing process pipeline, such as from very first contact to the filled-out online quote type. Next, pick metric behaviors for each incremental buying-process actions.

For instance, the first contact phase could feature such actions as becoming a follower on Facebook or joining a newsletter; these actions are just worth 1 or 2 points. Then the next stage, where the contact signs up for a webinar or downloads a report, might be worth 3 and 4 points. The additional the behaviors are in the pipeline, the greater the score must be. Points could even be granted for just how lots of phase two or three behaviors are shown.

4. Choose just what scores translate into action and for what team

Determine just what fit and behavior scores induce advertising or sales action. For one organization, Sales might reach out instantly to an opportunity with a high fit score, even if the lead demonstrated incredibly little on the behavior scale (e.g., came to be a Supporter on Facebook). For one more company, Sales could not get involved unless the fit is in the 5-10 selection and the behavior score is 8 or greater.

Creating an effective lead scoring process can vary by company or industry. The point is make sure that your team understands how to effectively spot and communicate the best opportunities so that you spend more time closing deals than chasing bad ones.

To see how we can help with the telecommunications element of bridging marketing and sales, give us call for a free, no obligation analysis of your organizations needs and budget at 1 (877) 629-3373.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

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The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trend has recently caught on over the last couple of years. Workers’ individual gadgets like Laptops, Smartphones or Tablets are now being carried around and used in workplace settings on a regular basis. In fact employees find greater fulfillment and are more imaginative when offered the freedom of working from house or other remote places. BYOD seems to be bucking the deeply-held notion that employee productivity and efficiency doesn’t automatically come out of a cubicle.

Perks of BYOD Programs

Businesses that welcome these programs have some advantages over competitors and other IT alternatives. For starters, BYOD programs normally reposition costs to the individual employees themselves.

As a manager, you might anticipate employees to debate against paying for their personal gadgets they use at work. Amazingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case. As the Good Modern technology State of BYOD Report states, “50 percent of companies with BYOD models are calling for employees to cover all costs– and they are reportedly happy to do so.”

Secondly, workers delight in the flexibility the BYOD program offers. BYOD policies such as that being originated by this California agency also inevitably supply personnels higher flexibility with regards to work location, with the option to work from home or other remote areas. For startup entrepreneurs and employees there’s no question for them whether they have a problem utilizing their phones and PC computers for work-related tasks. It is the new way in which teams with little resources accomplish more with less.

There are several unfortunate employees who are still needed to carry around two smartphones or two laptop computers– one released by the company, and the one for their own personal functions. Does this make sense?

Thirdly, Employees’ personal devices usually tend to be more cutting edge, so the organization gets the advantage of most up to date attributes and capacities.

Business are recognizing that individual employees are doing a much better job of managing and handling their tools than their overworked IT divisions. Maybe at some point this can be acknowledged at the government policymaker level– and personnels be enabled to write off part of the cost of their devices used for business purposes, just as self-employed people do.

Business and Services supporting the BYOD Trend

Business like Cisco is going the BYOD route because of a growing taste amongst younger employees for their own devices and tools.

Shoppers Stop, one of the leading retail stores in India states that it is motivating BYOD culture and has not spent a lot on tablets.

Workers at California’s Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) are asked to utilize their very own smartphones as a cost-saving measure.

Safety Concerns

Business balance sheets could look lucrative because of the discounts on hardware expenses and workers enjoy the freedom the BYOD policies offers. But the ease of BYOD is accompanied by significant data safety risks, which can easily prove to rack up immense costs.

A couple of protection and compliance issues mentioned below must be thought through at the organization level for those who are thinking of encouraging BYOD programs in their own companies.

The very first is to consider exactly what sorts of gadgets are enabled on the network. Particular gadgets are more secure than others, and companies need to be clear whether they mean to have an open environment or restrain the type or number of devices that workers can easily use.

Secondly, businesses can easily set out clear regulations about ownership, so that there can be no quarrel in the event of loss or theft of hardware. If a laptop gets stolen, for example, and the details on a stolen tool is jeopardized (and is not encrypted), who is to be held to account? Both worker and company have to comprehend who has the data on a shared work/home gadget or device, with clear guidelines on exactly how the hardware is guaranteed, and by whom.

In the event that a worker is terminated, or leaves the business organization of their own accord, retrieving business information can be a complication. There should be a policy in place that governs exactly how that information will be completely retrieved from the individual laptop computer and/or smartphone.

The Organizations must weigh the perks against the risks of these programs before going the BYOD course of action. Having stated that, the BYOD trend will continue to rise. According to Mr Peter Bocquet, Regional Director Partnership and Virtualisation Technologies Asia Pacific/Japan, Cisco thinks that over the next 5 to eight years, around 40 per cent of personnels will be retiring, and they will be replaced by the current set of graduates for whom freedom like BYOD might be very crucial.

Moving Your Business? Tips for moving your Telecom Services.

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Whether it is your phone system or your data center, moving can be complex and create unplanned disruptions to your business.

If you are considering a change in location, here are a few things to consider before moving day. To arrange for a no obligation consultation please email us at james.warren@rdmcomm.com.

Where are you going? Will you be in a city or suburb?

More populated areas will have a wider range of options, although logistics can also be more complex and sometimes more expensive.

• What type of structure? Is it a high-rise in an urban setting? A shopping center? A stand-along building?

High-rise building will have preexisting systems that you will need to work with or around. Find out what these may be before you sign the lease.

Stand-alone buildings may need to be retrofitted to accommodate your telecom needs. Consider the cost to benefit ratio into your plans.

Access to high-speed internet will vary depending on your location. Distance from carrier switches or COs, copper v. fiber availability, and service provider restrictions are another factor to consider.

• What about the wiring?

Will you need to have the space rewired to accommodate your network? Creating a plan around your data center and its special needs is essential to a smooth transition.

• What carriers and services are available?

Changing carriers can have an impact on whether your existing systems and equipment will continue to meet your needs.

• Are their union regulations?

Union workers have to follow strict guidelines. Be aware of how this may impact your schedule.

• Do you plan on keeping your current equipment, buying new or going “hosted”?

Often, moving presents an opportunity to upgrade your services. It doesn’t make sense to move outdated equipment when a hosted option could save you money and give you better service.

• What amount of downtime can you afford?

Some operations will need to plan for transitional services to prevent downtime disruptions during the move. There are a variety of options to consider.

• How much time do you have before the move?

The more time, the better planning you can do and the easier the move will go. At minimum, give yourself at least 90 days. The more complex your telecom system, the more time you need.

Moving your business can be a hassle. Moving your telecom services shouldn’t be, let us help you – starting with a no obligation

3 Business Audits to Save Money Now

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As a business owner, it is always important to be reinvesting the company’s profits back into the business. Having extra cash on hand to take advantage of opportunities when they are arise often makes the difference in this economy.

But how do you squeeze more out of your business activities and boost the health of your bottom line? By eliminating waste. Usually inefficiencies are the “silent killer” of profit margins. By examining your operations and examining how much you are paying for your business services, you can take action to start generating extra profit to be reinvested into the company and give you an extra edge over the competition.

Below are three ways to cut waste and start generating extra money from your business today.

Operational Audit

In operations management, the term throughput refers to the total amount of time it takes the business to complete one customer transaction or request. To complete this audit, track 10 customers from start to finish, as their request or transaction makes it’s way through the various departments in your company. Odds are that there is a disconnect in communication somewhere that’s causing employees to spend extra time on things. This may be because things are being done by hand or there is not a clearly defined process. Identifying ways to increase efficiency means that you can reduce backlog and spend less money on wages to help more customers.

Customer Retention Audit

The cost to acquire a customer is often 3x more than it is to retain a customer. Often, it is cheaper to simply make sure that your customers are happy and want to stay with you. The following are some questions to ask at the beginning of this audit:

  • How many return customers do I have?
  • How many times do they return?
  • Why do they decide to return?
  • How many customers do not return?
  • Why do they decide to not return?

Finding the answers to the questions will open up a lot of modes of action to convert more customers into return customers and make better use of your marketing dollars.

Business Services Audit

How much are you paying for your accounting system? Your customer service system? Often making a list of all your service providers and listing their competitors’ products is a useful way to see if you can accomplish the same objectives with less money. What about telecom services? This is certainly possible – but it can be complicated. Getting the right telecom set up is more than just picking a carrier –  it also involves your geography and the architecture of your building. In this case, it is better to not go it alone. Working with a trusted telecom agent ensures that the best technology meets the needs of your business operations and your budget. Working with a telecom agent has another advantage in that you can be up to date with cost saving technologies as they become available.

There are many simple and creative ways to improve your business’s bottom line and increase your competitiveness in the marketplace. If you are looking to examine your current telecom offering as part of your business services audit please do not hesitate to contact us at (877) 629-3373 for a free assessment and recommendation to save your company money.

Stop Looking for Social Media Quick Hits

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In today’s 24-hour news media machine, we are constantly bombarded by stories of overnight success and viral videos that garner national attention. It is easy to think that “going viral” is a simple task and that anyone can do it: all you need to do is sign up for a twitter account and click “submit.”

Unfortunately, this is not how the world works and it can be discouraging for business owners who are not seeing any results immediately. To combat this let down, business managers should remember that using social media as part of your marketing toolbox is more like saving for retirement than hitting the lottery. Social media is not the silver bullet of marketing. It will not cure cancer and it certainly can’t help you if you aren’t very good at marketing in the first place.

The trick is to be patient and find your own strategy that works for you. This often involves trying on social media marketing strategies that work for other and discarding them after some time. Given the amount sheer volume of content being posted on the internet every day, it takes time for the search engines – and even your – customers to find you.

In short, you wouldn’t tell your sales people to stop calling prospects simply because they got told “no” on the first call – the same goes for social media marketing.

Telecommunications: Your biggest investment

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A phone system is a phone system, right? It’s easy to think that because telecommunications technology is now commonplace, that any old solution will do. Well, you’d be surprised to hear that there are a number of reasons why telecommunications, and it’s sub-group – internet solutions, matters more to small business than ever before.

In this post we cover some of the top reasons why it is important for small business managers to work with an independent telelcom agent for all their telecommunications needs.

  1. People still like talking to businesses on the phone - as we pointed out, there’s a lot that online marketing and sales can work in tandem with each other. But at the end of the day, people will pick up the phone and call when they are very close to making a decision to buy. Making sure that your phone lines are working properly and that sales calls are going to the sales team and not the warehouse or operations team means that you have a better chance of closing a sale the moment the opportunity arises.
  2. More of your business is online - whether you like it or not, most tools available to business managers require an internet connection of some sort. Let’s not forget the most important business asset: your data. Whether it be your customer contact data or your sales and accounting data – you don’t realize how valuable access to all that information is until you can’t get to it, or worse – it is gone forever.
  3. We’re business people too - we see things from your perspective and can spend the time to come up with a solution that’s going to work best for you. We aren’t forced to offer only a single solution like our sales counterparts at the big telecom firms. We can make sure that you achieve all your business objectives and meet your budget.
  4. Our customer service is better - Have you had a really important problem that took forever to resolve because every time you talked to the company, you got a different customer service agent and needed to spend a lot of time repeating yourself? With an independent telecommunications agent like RDM Communications, we know your system and your business intimately, so we can diagnose problems faster and ensure that the solutions are right for your business.

There are countless advantages to using an independent telecom agent over a large corporation. With technology updating so rapidly these days, business managers need resources like RDM Communications to stay on top of these changes so they don’t have to. If you are interested in hearing more about what we can do for you and your business, feel free to look at our Products and Services section or pick up the phone call 1.877.629.3373.

Questions To Ask Before Starting A Marketing Campaign

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Asking the “right” questions will greatly improve your odds when it comes to any endeavor. When it comes to marketing, having the right answers will mean more clients at a lower cost to you. Here are 5 questions that will maximize your marketing efforts and dollars:

1. Who are your ideal clients? Most business professionals have a very vague or far too general idea of who their “best” clients really are. If you know where to find these clients and understand their characteristics (demographics, psychographics, affinities, etc.), then you can develop targeted programs which will increase sales more effectively.

2. How do your ideal clients respond to certain words, statements, or ideas? Doing a little research by spending time with your ideal clients, either online or in person, will give you an idea of how to interact with them. Use this knowledge in your written materials, your presentations, and whenever you speak with them.

3. How much information will your prospects actually read? Some people prefer short articles with 5-10 tips and others prefer longer reports. It may depend on their level of education, job, and time constraints. Knowing this information will allow you to tailor your marketing materials to your ideal client’s specifications.

4. What are the biggest challenges faced by your clients and potential clients, and do you have the solutions they need? You can’t connect with your prospects without knowing what they need and how you can help them. Make sure that you are addressing what they want and not what you think they want!

5. What is the best way to reach your ideal clients? If they belong to organizations, join the same groups and use your mutual membership as the foundation for a relationship. Some clients may prefer to network online via social networking sites. If so, ensuring that you have a presence on these sites and that you are an active participant will be a better investment of time and energy.

Asking these 5 questions will provide important answers that will ultimately help you determine which marketing strategies are best for growing your business.

Where Social Media and Sales Meet: The Telephone

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You may have been hearing about hearing a lot about using social media marketing to increase your company’s sales. There certainly is no shortage of pundits and experts touting the benefits of using social media for your business but how exactly does this happen?

Social media has come a long way from its humble beginnings, unfortunately it has a stigma to overcome to win over many small business owners skeptical about it’s ability to increase sales. To some, the term “social media” often creates an image of a middle-school aged teenager updating his twitter account to let friends know what she ate for lunch. While there is certainly some of that still happening, an increasing number of people – including some of your clients – are using social media to find information and solutions to their problems. In essence, social media is the online version of asking your friends and family for recommendations when you are thinking about using a new product or service. Used used effectively social media can increase sales by providing your prospective clients valuable and relevant information and encourage them to pick up the phone to have an in-depth conversation. A well-executed social marketing strategy is one that provides leads calling in already educated about how your products and services solve their problems – which leads to higher sales conversions and customer loyalty.

Below we’ve outlined a plan for action for using social media to educate your prospective clients and increase your sales conversions:

  1. Get inside the head of your clients - EVERYONE  says this and it is because so few do it. Because you are an expert in your field, it is easy to approach marketing conversations from a “solution-side” perspective. Start with the problem and build the bridge to your solutions.
  2. Write content that is useful and actionable - no one likes being stuck in a problem, so make sure that your content is easy to read and sheds some much needed light on the problem. Helping your customers overcome uncertainty – simply understanding the problem – helps reduce resistance to sales efforts.
  3. Use social media to get the word out AND listen - treat social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ as if they were billboards on the side of a major freeway. Now imagine that you could hear what people were saying about your ads as they drove by. Now imagine that you can talk back to them and have a meaningful conversation. This is the power of social media – it’s not just for teenagers.
  4. Use analytics and tools to get customers offline and on the phone - a dirty little secret in the marketing world is that there are a number of helpful analytical tools to know whether or not social media is causing your phone to ring. We found a useful  tool, CallRail, that tracks which social networks and marketing efforts are driving people to call your sales team. It is a perfect compliment to any phone/telecom system.

Social media is a powerful tool that compliments the sales process and when used in conjunction with a lot of useful tools, enable business managers to confidently step into the world of social media marketing.