by J David Childs

Created on: February 25, 2009

Executive Summary

The wise marketing sages will pontificate that one should not compete on price. However, the reality is that price is a major deciding factor when telecom procurement managers are selecting maintenance service providers for their enterprise's telecommunications assets. The squeeze is on your margins, as well as offering services that most other competitors in the same market space are offering.

What are your differentiators that set you apart from your competitors? Chances are that what you may think of as differentiators, are what your customers view as baseline offerings. Your best competitors have remote monitoring, 24x7 call center with tier-two technical support, OEM partnerships, on-site and certified technicians, four-hour response time

All this time, as your presenting your "differentiators" to the customer, the customer is thinking, "Big Whoop!"

What if you are attempting to shape an offer and you are competing against the incumbent? Price matters incredibly here. If you cannot significantly trim your margins (at least in the first year of a three year term), so as not to cause significant amount of cost to your potential customer in the transitional period of changing suppliers, then you definitely have to develop differentiators that set your offer well above the incumbent to make your offer the most compelling.

Some differentiators in mind could bear considerable incremental costs, but there are others, that if you are confident in your operations and have tight,succinct processes, will bear little costs if any. When packaged with the your usual list of services (the Big Whoop list) you will reap account growth and retention.

__________________________

What the customer wants, but does not already have

Take a step back and think for a moment Your customer or potential customer, the telecom manager, has a huge responsibility in maintaining one of the strategic assets of the enterprise. The value of the enterprise's telecommunications network is most certain to be in the millions of dollars and the value that flows through the same network is in the billions of dollars, both annually.

Another point to think about When you contract to deliver a maintenance service to your customer, it is not that your customer wishes to relinquish control of the enterprise's network, but to collaborate with you, as you leverage core capabilities that you have and the enterprise does not. The enterprise's telecom manager is still in control.

Inferred in these

• 1
• 2
• 3
• ...
• 10
• Next Page >>