“Consolidation of the carriers and the individual agent will be
challenged in the years to come, in that the increased complexity as the technology transitions to the data side of the house.”
— Dale Stein, Co-founder, TAG National
“With the continued convergence between IT and telecommunications, either the telecom agent channel or the VAR (system integrator) channel will have to cry ‘uncle’ and start to embrace the other’s technology. Personally, I think the VARs are best suited to take on this challenge just due to the nature of adopting the support structure necessary for telecom services vs. telecom agents taking on the role of providing equipment-based solutions. With that said, there is still plenty of room for partnerships between these two groups, but that adoption has been pretty slow at best. Perhaps it will pick up over the next decade or maybe VARs just may take over the telecom channel space altogether. Time will tell.”
— Brad Miehl, President & CEO, MicroCorp Inc.
“Business owners will need to invest in staff training to field knowledgeable people who can maximize margins and maintain a competitive edge. The cost of untrained employees will result in lost business and lower profit per transaction. WiBOC estimates the current cost of an untrained salesperson at over $50,000/year to the average wireless business. Many businesses are acquiring additional locations to produce economies of scale and reach higher income levels from their carrier. Fielding a well-trained staff in retail and/or B-to-B environments is critical to long-term success.
With ‘reported’ unemployment approaching 11 percent, finding employees will be much easier. Paying them, however, will become more difficult due to higher costs of inventory, smaller margins on the post-paid side and lower commissions for prepaid sales.”
— Mark Landiak, Executive Director, WIBOC (The Wireless Business Owners Consortium)
“Price compression will continue making it necessary to drive sales costs down. The industry’s indirect sales channel will continue to gain more market share within the carriers away from the direct sales forces for the majority of the next 10 years. I think some providers will re-engage a direct model in the later years of the 10-year period. The sales process will become more complex. Network sales will be integrated with equipment and software applications. The era of sales reps selling voice on price is over. The future success of that type of veteran will depend on their ability to partner with others that can provide the technical support that will be required by vendors and customers. The master agencies will become more established and harder for new companies to enter.”
— Geoffrey Shepstone, President, Telecom Brokerage Inc.
“Aside from the given requirement for the channel to stay one step ahead of customers’ technical requirements, successful agency owners will find significant opportunity to band together with other like-minded and synergistic agency entrepreneurs to aggregate their collective market presence. This is not likely to be a broad coalition of the various types of agencies, but rather a targeted consortium of organizations who have similar business philosophies and go-to-market strategies.
