Providing broadband and making it profitable is difficult but many companies are finding that having a range of value added services and products is the way ahead. What are these services and how can resellers engage with ISPs that help them grow their sales?
Some ISPs are now competing for hosted telephony business – providing the connectivity and the application sounds a reasonable idea – after all, it’s just the one throat to choke if there is a problem. What happens if a reseller signs a customer on a multi-year contract and after six months the end user goes bust? What liability does the reseller have? What makes for a good ISP Partner?
About Griffin
Griffin is the only channel-only supplier with a true aggregation strategy. We interconnect with eight carrier networks giving us access to thousands of UK POPs providing resellers with the widest choice of services at the best possible prices and service levels.
We have been around for 20 years and are experienced in making connectivity easy and profitable to sell. Our ethos is white label allowing resellers to sell under their own brand and own their own customers. By selling connectivity resellers are in the perfect position to upgrade speeds, upgrade networks, connect sites and ultimately own anything connected to and running over it (e.g. cloud and hosted PBX), generating long term, and high margin customers.
We excel in automation as we have a need to process increasing numbers of orders without continually hiring and training new staff ourselves. We need to keep our costs down to enable us to provide the best pricing to our Partners therefore we automate and integrate into carrier back-end systems wherever possible putting Partners in the driving seat.
When SMEs wanted broadband they came to their telephony providers who quickly realised that they could make more than just a commission from the carriers if they sold their own-branded services. We were first to market with MOPS, a system allowing resellers to order, provision and support white label broadband services.
Ethernet is the new broadband and we have developed online quoting tools providing all pricing, delivery times and service levels from all carriers in minutes. We have added reporting so resellers can monitor actual performance statistics for each carrier monthly to ensure they are offering the best options to their customers.
To reduce capex we have worked with our Partners to offer free installations. We also have a unique Liquidation Protection scheme that limits the financial exposure on long term contracts to only 12 months when a reseller’s end user goes bust.
The Core Products
ADSL2+ is now widely available and the market is experiencing a wave of demand for fibre broadband (FTTC), copper Ethernet (EFM) and FTTC Ethernet. FTTC provisioning has been written into BTW’s back-end systems and Griffin interconnects to eight different Ethernet carriers from which we create eight fibre Ethernet products and two copper Ethernet (EFM) products. Griffin has also invested in a range of easy up-sell solutions to compliment the core portfolio.
The Upsell
Network Monitoring
Griffin’s philosophy is to give control to our Partners so that they are seen to be adding the value, not Griffin. Ideally our Partners want to be able to resolve their customers’ concerns the first time they call into their help desk. Griffin’s Network Monitoring Portal gives them a real-time view of every site, all through one easy-to-use portal. The system is securely partitioned so if they want to give access to their end customer to see just their own network, they can.
Security
As end users trade up to faster more robust connectivity they demand better firewall protection that they can configure themselves. Many resellers do not have expertise in this field and so Griffin offers a managed service hosted on a carrier class firewalls in the network and offered as a partitioned, virtual and managed service.
This then presents excellent up-sell opportunities for resellers to add on secure access for remote workers and content filtering and intrusion protection in the future.
What makes Griffin different?
- Software automation – all of our quoting, provisioning and management tools are extended transparently to our Partners so that they keep control of their customers’ experience, deal with orders and issues swiftly and keep costs to an absolute minimum. Our Partners have some of the highest FCR (First Call Resolution) rates in the industry for connectivity and this means lower overheads and happier customers.
- Speed – For many products the likelihood of an end user ordering is directly proportionate to the time it takes for the reseller to get them a quote. Only a year ago it would have taken a reseller days and even weeks to get all the potential circuit speeds and prices for a particular site. With Griffin this now takes seconds and the reseller can be sure they are getting the best possible prices versus dealing with the carrier directly.
- Liquidation protection – with 85% of end users opting for 36 month contracts many smaller resellers have felt excluded from the market due to the financial risk of their customer going bust. Griffin is the only wholesale service provider to offer liquidation protection such that if the reseller’s customer goes into liquidation they will only ever be liable for the first 12 months of a contract.
- Project management - despite having to deal with every major carrier in the UK our provisioning teams have a 96% on-time delivery success rate. Our intuitive software automation tools compensate for deficiencies within Telco processes and our supplier managers have the domain knowledge and tenacity to help suppliers overcome obstacles, whilst keeping the reseller constantly updated.
- Pricing – The scale of our operation means we have the best buy prices in the industry and due to our efficiency and software automation we are able to operate at low margins. This means the reseller knows they have the best prices in the industry helping them to beat their competition without having to sell at silly margins.
- Value Added Services – Once they have sold the initial connection to their customer the reseller wants to be able to improve the revenue and margin from that site by selling in other products. Griffin offers white label cloud-based services like Virtual Firewall, Network Monitoring and Online Backup that can more than triple the monthly value of the original order.
How do we help resellers grow? Griffin has two tried and tested programmes to help resellers grow, The Ethernet Sales Generator™ and The Data Revenue Generator™. Our ethos is to hire the best sales and pre-sales staff as a white label resource for Partners to lead-generate and increase recurring revenues on data within existing customer bases. Each Griffin Partner has access to our Partner portal containing marketing collateral required to promote connectivity to their customer bases. Each Partner has a dedicated Account Manager who is employed to generate business for their Partners.
Firstly we migrate broadband bases to Griffin so that new orders can be placed in our MOPs system and faults can be managed directly and closed quickly. We then take Partners through the following steps to guarantee Ethernet sales:
Step 1 – The Business Buy-in™ – make sure there is a good fit
Step 2 - The Skills Academy™ - we train all sales, provisioning and support teams
Step 3 – The Prospect Profile™ - we generate leads for resellers to close
Step 4 – The Conversion Programme™ - we convert the leads
Step 5 – The Safe Arrival™ - we project manage orders to successful go-live
We run the same stages for generating and closing large data networks and have a 90% close rate when pre-sales are involved from the first meeting.
Offers
We run campaigns to help Partners sell new products such as zero installs on FTTC circuits for three months. We also help put together marketing campaigns to promote our offers using our own experience with a hints and tips guide for success.
We are channel-only therefore we come to work every day with the objective of making it easy and profitable for resellers to sell connectivity. We provide the largest portfolio at the best pricing with what we think is the best support tools from all inclusive carrier pricing tools to automated order process to project managed delivery. We have been doing this for a long time and our staff are experienced at trouble shooting and avoiding all known pitfalls, which is why our training sessions are so well attended and the feedback we get from our Partner base is so positive. Our ethos is around innovation so we will continue to listen and innovate to make it as easy as possible for resellers to make money out of connectivity.
What makes a good ISP?
- Experience - good track record and case studies
- Trust – Channel-only
- White label – promote your own brand
- Extensive product range – all services from all carriers in one place
- Excellent pricing – good margin potential
- Self-service tools – complete control over quotes, orders, asset management and fault resolution
- Revenue generating programmes – find and close leads
- Good project management so orders are delivered on time
- Excellent fault resolution – pro-active communication and quick resolutions
- Easy to deal with – reliable supplier you wouldn’t mind exposing your best customers to