Posts by virgo »

The cool thing about a blog is that once the info is there, it’s there forever. So, it makes sense to do the work right initially. One of the things we’ve done right is put together a great website with some good articles on our blog. Here’s an example of how I used it recently…

I visited a prospective client in Maitland with Freddie ( new salesfrog ). Our plan was to pitch our ADSL VPN solution ( one of Frogfoot’s many cool products - I’ll write more about this later ). Well, we found that this company had in fact already implemented a similar solution , not nearly as funky and smart as ours, but reasonably good nonetheless ( I’ll tell you why ours is better in that same post ).

One of the questions the IT Manager had was how our mail filtering was done. Ha ! Now I had him ! He walked right into it. I asked him to open his browser, took him to the Frogfoot Homepage and pointed out our recent post explaining our mail filtering system.

Boy was he impressed! He was able to read and understand our methodology as a result of the cool flow diagrams created by our graphic artist Vincent ( a living legend ).

Another example I have is me bumping into an ex-colleague a day or so ago. He asked about the ISP industry, and I pointed him to my post. That opened a can of worms which will lead to more business down the line no doubt

I’ve been involved in IT sales for almost 10 years, and in ISP specifically for the past year. In that year, I have found that despite most businesses using ISP services, very few IT people seem to know much about: how much they’re spending | what they’re paying for | how long their contract runs for.

I reckon it’s a “cloak and dagger industry”, and some of the reasons are that :

• the definition of ‘broadband’ services is vague.
• shaped Vs unshaped bandwidth is a foreign concept to most.
• rate-based Vs volume-based bandwidth and connectivity is even more foreign.
• differences in Upload Vs Download speeds are not known or understood.
• Telkom doesn’t tell us how much contention they have on their ADSL lines.
• customers are unable to confirm the contention ratio they get on their internet links.
• ISPs sell solutions like an “ADSL MPLS network”.
• leased lines are bundled with bandwidth and we think it was “made that way”.
• they have this concept of a “rolling contract” which ties you in till eternity.
• my sales colleagues in this industry seem to be even less knowledgeable than I am.
• IT Manager/Directors believe whatever the ISP sales people are telling them !

“I don’t believe it” you say ?? Well, I could give you a few examples …. Recently I dealt with a JHB company who believed they were being serviced with 1:1 contention on their international bandwidth. The price seemed too good to me, so I encouraged them to do some investigation. Alas, they found that they had in fact been serviced with 1:4, despite what the ISP ( think ‘Golden Arches’ ) contract had stipulated.

So what’s my point ? Well, it’s that you get good at judging people; get good at developing trusting relationships with reputable suppliers. And… when you find a good one, that you stick with them !