If you watch any television at all, you have undoubtedly seen hundreds of advertisements for “Business Cable”
The commercials take you into the offices of these business owners that are completely frustrated with the “Phone Company” and the high prices that they push upon their customers. Customer after customer holds up their current bill with a look of disgust and then begins to tell us how much faster and more affordable their new service is from the cable company.
So here is my gripe. It is not what you may be thinking. I agree that the cable companies offer a great product for the home user or the small business. They can bundle telephone lines with the internet capability and the net result is a very nice voice and data solution. I use it at my home every day and it is wonderful. Notice I said my home? The problem with the Cable companies pitching their services to the business is not a feature/benefit problem, it’s an availability problem. In a recent project for one of my customers, we set out to price cable voice and data services for approximately 45 locations. After 60 days of setting up site surveys and pre-qualifying these locations, we found that 4 of them could sign up for the service. The cable companies built out a fabulous residential network but they are still in the very early stages of building out their network to the business locations. The net result for my customer was a bunch of hype about converting to “Business Cable” only to waste over 60 days of everybody’s time and delaying their project into the following quarter. They placed orders for DSL and the project finished up quickly thereafter.
So my advice to the cable companies: take some of that advertising money and build a network that my customers can sign up for.
