Source: Connectivity Guide, Comms Business July
This is creating a golden opportunity for resellers to upgrade their DSL circuits and is opening doors to more core sales and protecting future revenues for resellers today.
Demand
As SMEs become more reliant on online services to run their businesses they want faster, symmetrical and more reliable connectivity to the Internet. They don’t want to share the bandwidth with anyone else and they need the service fixed quickly when they have a problem. Ethernet has become the obvious choice attracting more carriers into the market, creating a wider choice of products, broader coverage and lower prices. Spiralling prices unlock more pent-up demand and volumes surge again-and so on. This is creating a fantastic opportunity for resellers to up-sell their DSL customers into long term, high value Ethernet contracts.
Opportunity
If you own the motorway you are in prime position to provide the services that travel over your road (Ethernet). If these services are easy to sell, you can focus on service and watch Average Revenue Per Customer increase. If competitors want to get to your customers they are going to have to go through you and why would you help when you can retain the customer and the margin yourself?
Reaction
The business broadband market is saturated and resellers are under pressure to compete with the larger players, who are on a mission to win bases from each other by combining services and promoting price-led campaigns. Resellers are reacting by increasing their portfolio of broadband services to get the best wholesale pricing and by creating bespoke packages designed to meet the needs of their customers. Resellers are focussing on excellent service wraps but their margins are being eroded and new recurring revenue streams are required to help meet the targets for the year.
It costs five times more to generate a new customer that it does to generate business from existing customers so the most cost effective way to increase revenues is to upgrade your existing customers to more margin-rich services.
Solution
If you have 1000 broadband customers and you find that the rate of signing up new broadband customers is declining and your churn rate is increasing what can you do?
Step 1
We know that there is pent-up demand for faster, more reliable connectivity so find out what upgrades are available for those 1000 customers before they have to ask you and more importantly before they are approached by your competition. If you trust your ISP not to use your data for their own prospecting ask them if they have automated tools to ‘wash’ databases for FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet). Griffin has washed over 100,000 telephone numbers for Partners in this way since we launched FTTC and coverage has climbed rapidly. Today the score for CLIs in enabled exchanges regularly exceeds 40%. For your larger business customers that could justify moving up to Ethernet we provide you with self-service automated quoting tools via our Partner portal. This doesn’t only generate thousands of prices every day it is also a real-time database of the installation performance of every carrier against their published lead-time. Furthermore each quote details the support SLAs offered by each carrier as well as any other potential benefits to using that carrier over other Ethernet suppliers. Although none of the carriers allow total software integration for Ethernet in the way they do for broadband, Griffin has worked with all the major suppliers to automate the process of delivering Ethernet. As a result on-time delivery has improved to 96% on average and every Partner is provided with weekly updates of every Ethernet circuit in progress.
Step 2
Give your new list of prospects to your sales team, who can call or email out the information to customers. In most cases there will be few barriers to your customer upgrading. Griffin offers zero set-up charge options on all products and very often the customer will not even have to change their username, password and IP address. Most of your customers will be comfortable with committing to three or five year contracts in return for a better deal and this gives you security of revenue as well as giving them security of supply. If you are worried about your customer going bust in a longer term contract - don't be. Griffin runs a liquidation protection scheme that limits your cancellation liability to 12 months whatever the contract term.
Step 3
Run your return on investment report. How much did you spend on acquiring new business from your existing base and how many new contracts did you win? If you use suppliers like Griffin to generate your leads for you and use your existing sales teams often no additional spend generates new business.
Conclusion
Your customers will want faster more reliable connectivity at some stage as their usage increases and you need to be ready when they do. They take broadband from you why wouldn’t they up-grade to Ethernet with you? You can be pro-active by contacting your existing customers with all of their upgrade options and you will close a good percentage increasing your recurring revenues and stopping the competition from getting a look in. What are you waiting for? Contact your ISP now and see what they can do to help.