As a CxO or IT director, you are no doubt the target of a constant barrage of incoming marketing for “new, better, cheaper, faster…” telecom and IT solutions – what we now call “ICT” (information & communications technology) managed services. The “biz dev” (business development) sales professionals of all the ICT vendors are constantly begging you to take a call, watch a webinar or in some other way bring yourself one step closer to buying whatever they have to sell today so they can meet their quota by the last day of every calendar month.
Instead of weeding through all these ICT biz dev cold callers yourself to figure out who has something worth looking at to solve one or more of the mountain of ICT challenges your midsize, multi-location business is suffering from (cybersecurity, mobile workforce, “omni” contact center tech, etc.), wouldn’t it be great if you could join a nonprofit educational business association that could objectively help you sort through the ICT solution providers? Well that great thing is here for you now & it’s called “Telecom Association”.
For over 20 years, Telecom Association operated as a business trade organization that facilitated ICT vendors and ICT sellers educating one another how to sell their solutions to you – the ICT buyer. Before we ever picked up the phone to call you we were trained to overcome your every possible objection and sell over, through or around every competitor. Just as you get harrassed every day by sellers trying to sell you something, we get harrassed every day by ICT vendor providers trying to teach us how to sell you something.
As “ICT technology advisors”, our job is to pick through all the ICT provider’s sales pitches and figure out which are the actual best three solution provicers in every ICT category under the sun so we’re able to share them with you in a 30-second sound bite whenever we can capture your attention for 30-seconds. For over 20 years Telecom Association has been collecting and processing “How to Sell ICT Solutions”. Now instead of simply storing the “How to Sell” information, we’re translating to information into “How to Buy”. It’s actually pretty easy because “How to Sell” and “How to Buy” are simply two sides of the same ICT coin.
So what you, the ICT buyer, will learn at this Telecom Association blog is everything we learn to sell you – flipped over – you’re going to learn 1) who are the top providers in any ICT category, 2) who are the top distributors of the top providers in any ICT category, and 3) best practices for how to buy the best provider’s solution from the best distributor of that solution in a fair manner.
Telecom Association’s “formula” that ensures an equitable ICT marketplace where all three parties (buyer, seller & vendor) are treated fairly is “Education + Transparency = Accountability”
TA believes that when all three parties are educated about the ICT solution ecosystem and transparent about their decision process, a win-win-win solution transaction is possible where all three parties hold themselves accountable to one another.
(Want a Sneak Peak at What TA Will Teach End-Users?)
Click this link to view a blog post from Telarus, one of the most prolific ICT distributor training organizations in our industry. In this blog post, one of the Telarus founders, Patrick Oborn, provides a January 2020 overview of the multitute of solution vendors in just one ICT category – unified communication as-a-service or UCaaS (what we used to call business phone systems). Click here to see a similar summary of all the top 2020 cloud solution providers. Each week, TA members sit through hours of training from every ICT vendor under the sun in the UCaaS category as well as dozens of other ICT categories.
TA’s job will be to work with the top distributors of all the top solutions to translate the “How to Sell” content to “How to Buy” content and publish it here so you can learn it just as soon as we learn it so that you as a buyer can be an equal partner at the ICT transaction table with the ICT seller and provider.
To prove that this vision will become a reality, look at this website published by Rob McCoy of Ram Communications. Rob is showing on his publicly accessible “Telecom 101” webpage how he’s translated what he’s learned from his ICT vendors into “How to Buy ICT” content for his customers. And Rob’s been publishing this “How to Buy” content for his clients and prospects for over 10-years! Check out Rob’s YouTube channel here. I can say without hesitation that Rob’s customer “How to Buy” content sets the absolute standard for an ICT “technology advisor”. TA’s vision is to teach all our TA seller members how to follow Rob’s example of translating “How to Sell” distribute content into “How to Buy” end-user content.
