Can telco providers learn to think backwards? - Industry Trend or Event

CommunicationsWeek International, April 16, 2001 by Michael D. Radice

Today, selling a product means selling what that product does.

To be successful in the marketplace of the future, telecoms providers have to reassess their approach to sales and marketing. The market for telecommunications services has clearly become value-based and solutions-oriented, and a salesperson now must also act as a consultant to the client, selling services as much as the products that will enable those services. The very survival of some providers may depend upon this.

Yet businesses-voice carriers as one example-continue to march to sales defeat with an attitude that price, technology, acquisitions and big advertising programs are all that are needed to carry the day. Buyers have become far too informed and sophisticated to fall prey to the lure of such shallow marketing.

But telecoms providers continue to try and solve their growth and profit problems with the latest stock offering or the overuse of consumer-oriented marketing methods. Even the amount of money available to camouflage their problems is now rapidly disappearing with voice revenues. Alliances didn't work. The newest technology is not always wanted. The impending collapse of the cache-power of "brand names" is causing organizational havoc, panic and loss of customer loyalty. This is not a positive climate for change.

Why is the landscape of the global marketplace now littered with an ever-increasing number of floundering telecoms providers?

The problem is that current sales and marketing leadership continually insists on doing sales and marketing backwards. They want to define a rigid product or service and then figure out how to convince someone, mostly in their old, existing customer base, to buy it.

The new era demands "real" selling. This means that comprehensive, value based custom solutions to a customer's need must be defined first. Only then is a custom solution engineered and its benefits valued.

It never occurs to most providers to start by finding out what the customer really wants or needs. Providers usually want to convince the potential customer that what they have is what the customer needs. To say this in another way, most telecoms providers are not prepared to sell solutions because they cannot reverse their thinking.

There is too much dependence in telecoms on "selling" price. The real starting point for telecoms provider survival and success is developing and training a sales organization in a process that teaches them to sell value in solutions.

Today's sales and marketing leadership needs to clear their desks of "magic pill" thinking and get down to work on the essentials of real sales and marketing. Target customers want skilled sales representation, capable of grasping and understanding the full life-cycle needs of their desired services-based solutions.

Gone are the days where price and technology are remedies to falling market share and profits. And surely gone are the days of the "build it and they will come" approach to sales and marketing. Potential customers have too many options today, and they are seeking providers that can deliver benefits that are demonstrable and measurable.

The successful providers of tomorrow will be those that are capable of real salesmanship and those that offer a sales organization to the marketplace that is itself a distinctive core competency of their business offering. Those who can do this will have reversed their thinking and put the customer's needs first.

Michael D. Radice is managing partner of MKTG: marketing technologies, a sales and marketing consultancy and chief executive of Sellution Services, a Web-based sales force performance development ASP at www.sellution.com. He was formerly vice president of corporate marketing and communications at Infonet Services Corporation.