Several years back, I would go into a meeting with a potential customer that was looking for a new PBX and begin the process of learning about their business and their telecom needs. I was going to show them how my product could help with all of their problems. My goal was to show them that my product was so superior to my competition that it was the only intelligent option. After years of this it dawned on me that we were all selling the same thing. Reliability was no longer an issue and there were more “features” than any 10 customers combined would use.
A typical customer would tell me that they were looking at Avaya, Nortel (me) and Cisco. My reply would be to point to each of the demo phones left behind and say “same, same, same” because they were. The industry had made some great telephone systems that lasted for years but that was it. The industry had hit a plateau and there was no innovation.
It got so old that I sold my company and moved on.
I recently made a decision that I was going to look under the hood of the telecom industry that had treated me so well in the past and see if I should spend the last 10 years of my working life doing what I had done in the first 20 years of my working like.
My approach was simple. If I was the director of IT for a 500 person company with multiple locations, what would I buy.
Long story short, here I am back in the industry and finally I no longer need to say “same, same, same”. I am excited to write about how I picked the product and service to sell for the next 10 years. Please stay tuned.
