I have been watching the situation with Nortel with interest since they went bankrupt and wondering where the value sits for various suitors. I confess to a degree of surprise that the only news I have read about is Telecoms vendors showing interest. Why not Cisco or Microsoft for example? Is there not an opportunity to make an aggressive land grab and perhaps make significant inroads into the Telecoms market place where Avaya and other traditional voice vendors are currently dominant.
So back to the initial comment- where is the value when there is so much apparent duplication. I can’t however argue that $475million isn’t pretty good value for a significant global player like Nortel.
I watched C4’s Gerry’s Big Decision last week. I was hooked – for the uninitiated, Sir Gerry Robinson takes a detailed look at failing businesses around the country with a view to potentially investing his own money and helping the business to survive and thrive. The two businesses Gerry looked at last week were an old family furniture business in Lancashire that was on its knees and a small pie-making business in the south west. The interesting thing for me was that both businesses were suffering the same issue – NOT ENOUGH SALES. The furniture business had issues with poor communication and relationship between the owner and the Managing Director, and I observed a lack of sales focus generally – for example, there was no incentive in place for the salespeople to grow/develop the business.
Both businesses appeared to have good, saleable products, yet as we all know, nothing will happen until a sale is made. I don’t believe for a minute that this is in any way unique, and indeed why there is a need to ensure that you have an effective (and integrated) sales and marketing plan that covers the basics such as
- Having the right (well-trained) salespeople in the team representing you
- An effective customer segmentation map
- A clear customer contact strategy
- Plenty of resilience and persistence
- A clear “value proposition” for the product – a good example of this was the furniture manufacturer was not crisp about the product guarantees, which could be deal maker/breakers
- And always be following up conscientiously
Finally, the only salesperson that we saw was the one representing the pie manufacturer, who, to be blunt, was a square peg in a round hole and had very little idea what his approach should be and who his customers would be and, I guess, sales in general. His approach was at best parochial, and he was not considering where the product could be sold. As Donald Trump says – “If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.”
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I am philosophically thinking about my life as a journey and how all of the various experiences are shaping me into who I am today, and what I will be tomorrow. Very rarely do we get the time and opportunity to do this naval gazing, and yet I have been fortunate in getting the chance. By the way, I think the phrase “it’s not what happens to us, but how we respond to it that matters” is a great example of the fact that we often have very little influence over “things” that happen to us in life, BUT, we absolutely can choose how we respond to them!
Back to my opening comment – through the opportunity of redundancy, I took the chance to review and evaluate my life’s journey, and think about “ME PLC” in many different ways – what I stand for and what’s important to me etc. This part of my journey has been both very important and enlightening in that I have learnt much more about me. In so doing, I have built value into my future work opportunities: Grafting onto my sales/leadership/team expertise, with 2 qualifications from INLPTA – a Coaching diploma and a Leadership diploma rich in Neuro Linguistic Programming language.
I also learnt that whilst I do have a strong independent streak, I also enjoy a working environment that enable rich people interaction and that enables me to take my experience and share with other people though mentoring and coaching and general interaction.
I am thinking much more now about the journey and hope that people reading this will take this as a catalyst for them to take more control.
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Telecoms – everyone’s an expert
I have worked in telecoms most of my working life and I have seen much change on one hand and yet paradoxically very little on the other.
Telecom to most people appears to mean telephony – I.e. a device for speech for use at home, in the office or whilst mobile, and from this perspective, apart from changes in phone set designs and disparate approaches from vendors on the layouts and labelling conventions (some use simple text whilst others use icons that I can’t for the life of me work out – so what hope is there for the uninitiated) there has been very little change. Even the newer entrants from the data World have taken a fairly conventional approach, which is probably understandable.
There is much change talked about more at the large enterprise end of the commercial market place, and this is at an infrastructure (plumbing) level. IP or Internet Protocol to give it its full name is a different approach to transmission of the voice signals that for most of us means very little. After all, who made a fuss over marketing the fact that the “old world” was TDM or Time Division Multiplexing? So what! Does it really matter? Perhaps not, but then again perhaps it does – the answer lies in the “what does it mean to my business if I change/don’t change”. The impact could be very little; however, it could deliver significant additional capability for your organisation and cost savings too – especially if you can share traffic on inter-office links, and use other low cost network carriers for some traffic. There is no simple answer to the conundrum, it just needs careful consideration from your perspective for your business, and weighing up the pros and cons – because there could well be some, for example, if your data infrastructure is already creaking at the seams, it could well require an investment to update before adding voice as well. A lot of this will depend on your organisations approach to return on investment and how you measure the benefits etc. Just get some independent advice before jumping in.
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This particular saying, whilst in certain circumstances may hold true does NOT always hold true.
Having been involved for many years (more than 22 years in fact gosh) in the telecommunications market, I have seen many changes and lots of exciting technology that really enhances the way businesses can service and support their customers, and enable people to work flexibly. All of this carries a burden of cost – after all the vendor pays to develop the clever software and hardware to support it, plus lots of testing to ensure the deliverables are truly reliable and resilient so as not to let you down. It is therefore no surprise that this all requires customers to make an investment from their hard won revenues.
Refreshing then to learn that competitive pressures and other factors are bringing down the cost of communicating and new technologies are enabling greater choice – all of which results in opportunities to reduce telecom expenses. Savings of 40%-50% are not uncommon especially for companies who have a number of locations, and a lot of land line to mobile calls.
Is your company wasting money to the tune of an additional 60% over and above what it could be? I would be surprised if you couldn’t save money and there is no burden of cost for new equipment – How compelling is that?
Ernst & Young, Slaughter and May and Rolls Royce all benefited from a free no obligation consultation and now enjoy the regular lower costs that you could.
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Listen to language – its very enlightening. You can hear the self-limiting beliefs that people have “become attached to” and really own. People will argue for their weaknesses and guard them like a highly prized possession. And yet these are actions that hold us back ultimately from where we desire to be and certainly from where we could be. For example, I recently heard some of the following statements which I’m certain you’ll recognise.
I can’t do that because…
Well that’s me…
He makes me so mad…
I can’t help worrying…
Can you see the patterns here? These comments are firmly in the effect area and they are often caused by our belief systems and experiences. One of the best examples of this I heard was during a recent meeting where we were discussing our children. My friend (name withheld to protect identity) started to describe a series of conversations he had had with his son whom was described as a trifle lazy. In fact he had said to his son frequently “you are so lazy”. During a later encounter he had asked his son WHY he wasn’t doing something, to which his son casually replied “it’s because I’m lazy dad”! Talk about give a dog a bad name. I think this is a good illustration of language and it’s impact.
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Long before I became a coach, I held a belief about coaching and what it was, and now realise that I actually hadn’t ever given it much more than a passing consideration. I certainly never considered the value coaches bring to people. Now I realise from the basic premise of coaching (the individual already has all of the resources necessary to move themselves forward) how valuable it can be. Often people find themselves “stuck” somewhere, hanging on to less than useful limiting beliefs and unable to move forward to where they want to be. A good coach can help with this movement – drawing on your own resources and enabling greater self belief – leaving behind the unhelpful and limiting beliefs. Having been coached myself, I found many moments that were EUREKA moments of realisation.
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Gartner states that around 80% of telecoms bills have errors that are never found or reported, whilst up to 35% of all fixed telecoms assets are surplus to business requirements. In fact, according to research, more than 60% of firms do not have any kind of accurate inventory of their telecoms estate.
Which is quite scary when you think that analysts regularly report external communications costs as being a top-three, non-payroll expense in most large organisations. The good news is that this can simply be rectified and often without changing your service provider – http://www.peraconsulting.co.uk/save-money-on-telecoms/
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If like me you are getting to grips with the latest trends in social media with the likes of twitter, facebook, linkedin, friendfeed etc, then you are probably familiar with the regularity of the updates and in the case of the micro blogging of twitter then you like me are probably wondering how on earth some people manage to send so many tweets every day as well as holding down a full time job. There is a whole industry grown up off the back of this new phenomenon, with applications galore to provide access whilst on the go (from your mobile) and to automate much of this. My thought here, is that with the increased use of automation – does this take away the personal touch and some of the very purpose of social media – being personal contact? I am comfortable with a degree of automation, but how much is too much – for example if everyone is just "sending" who is reading and responding?
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How cool is this – wordpress enabling posting from any email address anywhere in the World. Outstanding! Check it out for yourself http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/post-by-email/
and remember “Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to slide in sideways, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, screaming ‘Woo Hoo, what a ride!’ (anon)
Have a great bank holiday weekend everyone
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