A Look at a Book: Sellecom

I recently read the book SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud Services by Peter Radizeski. I've known Peter for years; he's an independent consultant who primarily works with service providers on hosted strategies. Peter's an active blogger, and he compiled/revised many of his posts into a book format. It's a clever idea as there just are not that many books targeted specifically to this industry, yet everyone and their brother seems to offer SIP trunks these days.

The book is comprised of 30 chapters. Here are some sample chapter titles:

1: What is Cloud
4: Cloud Hype
14: Marketing Cloud
17: Hosted vs. Premise
20: The Sales Process
30: MPLS

The book appears to be largely aimed at folks new to the industry. It offers a fairly broad definition of cloud by focusing more on virtual networking aspects. Although it covers a wide variety of technical topics, Peter uses plain english to help sales staff convey these topics to non-technical prospects; for example, mobility, scalability, and ease of use.

Peter focuses on the cloud in terms of customer value and applications. He avoids telecom pipes and managed services. The money (or more accurately the margins) are in applications, and this rightly so is a harder sale. He writes, "When the sale becomes about business process change or fork-lift upgrades (like Hosted UC or Virtual Desktop), the sales skills change. Intelligent questions, actively listening, excellent follow-up, creativity, product knowledge, and more now come into play for the agent or sales professional."

Selling cloud is not for everyone. Transactional sales types are motivated and driven by quick hits. Those reps won't be happy with cloud applications. The problem is, they won't be happy with the decreasing commissions and increased competition, either.

I did like Peter's take on "Net Heads" vs. "Bell Heads." According to Radizeski, a Bell Head sells a SIP trunk as a replacement for TDM services. A Net Head sells a SIP trunk to add functionality. He offers numerous sales tips to become a Net Head. For example, AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (to hear it chanted, rent Glengarry Glen Ross. He also explains how a sales SWAT team can penetrate new accounts. In chapter 24, Peter offers pages of questions designed to identify UC cloud opportunities.

All in all, Sellecom raises several issues and asks a lot of questions. The book would also be appropriate for a class or group setting. Sellecom 2 is available in print or for download from Amazon.