The Transformation of Telecom Advisors – Part 1

TELECOM ADVISORS
Tranformation leader: Dan Vidal, Managing Director
Number of employees: 5
Year established: 2002
Original transactional business model: Telecom agent/subagent
Post-transformation business model: As our name reflects, we aim to be our customers’ telecom advisor for all things telecommunications related. We strive to be “trusted advisers" and attempt to be a business partner to our customers and not just a vendor. We’re highly focused on working within a holistic view of our customers’ businesses and look for the best solutions for them in the telecom space and often beyond. We pride ourselves as subject matter experts in our field and although we don’t profess to know everything about everything, we do know exactly how to get results and where to go to find the customer the right solutions.

How has your company moved beyond transactional sales models?

We’ve always offered consulting services and billed for our time, but now professional services is growing and generating more revenue. We also subcontract work now whereby before we did it all ourselves.

We now offer full telecom life cycle management to our clients, which we charge for. We consider this a “managed service" to a great extent that makes us a direct supplier to our clients and not just the telecom broker or account manager. This is also a growing area of our business that brings in recurring revenue. We have several different offerings in this category (not your run-of-the-mill TEM software), one of which includes a wireless mobility management solution that expanded our footprint beyond wireline.

We partner with certain “specialty" or niche providers in very specific areas that make sense for some of our clients’ needs. Although to some extent this might be transactional, this allows us to be a very integral part of our clients’ business/processes and takes us higher up the value chain. One example is a voice recovery service that is a cloud-based solution that can recover all customers’ incoming calls (real-time) and have infinite control of what they do with those calls in the event of an outage. This makes us part of our customers’ business continuity/disaster recovery planning team. We even help clients formulate and document BC/DR plans for their entire organization.

We’re also exploring developing a few offerings for the telecom channel itself, which would be a completely different business segment.

Why did your company begin its transformation away from transactional sales?

When did your company begin its transformation away from transactional sales?

I would honestly say that from day one of our business, we branded ourselves and worked really hard in being “trusted advisers" to our customers and focused on solutions, relationships and helping our clients succeed. That said, for many years even though this was the case, 99 percent of our revenue still came from commissions off circuit sales and, therefore, kept us in the transactional sales model. Although this is still a very important part of our business and will continue to be for some time, we’ve now begun to diversify a bit and began this transformation in 2008. It was right around the time of the economic collapse whereby we had been thinking about this for years but then decided it was time to act.

How complete is your company’s transformation?

I would say we’re still in the early stages — maybe 25 percent.