If you are in the booming field of telecom and related services and hardware, you need to know that the market is changing. Change can be a good thing, but don’t let the change catch you blind-sided. Rather, be aware of how things are changing and what you need to do in order to embrace that change to the benefit of your company’s bottom line.

Every business wants to grow their business. A business in a particular area would love to be able to dominate their niche market or sub-market for their particular product or service. But the traditional ways of making that happen are changing and you should be aware of what that change is and how you can embrace it to your advantage.

There are still companies that employ the age old technique of pounding the pavement. While that may yield some success with more traditional products, the world of telecom and the acceptance of the Internet as a superb marketing medium has been replacing the burning of shoe leather to a great extent. It becomes obvious to the astute business owner that he wants to invest his marketing dollars where he is going to get his greatest ROI (Return On Investment) which is a Business 101 principle.

Even embracing the Internet, how has that been done to date? There are three methods with varying degrees of success and each with their set of challenges, which we will look at briefly here.

Buying Leads

There are various companies online who employ various techniques for capturing what an online customer is looking for and will sell you those leads. For a high-demand product, especially telecom related, those leads can go for as much as $20 each or even more, and at that point you have no guarantee that the lead was not a 12 year old kid or a bored Internet surfer, you have still paid good money for the lead.

Your Own Web Page

You of course almost certainly have a web page for your business, outlining the products and services you can provide. But spending the time and effort on those pages to get them a top ranking within Google and the search engines is an extremely difficult task, and chances are high that you do not have sufficient IT resources to accomplish this, or if you do accomplish, to provide the ongoing maintenance required to keep your high positioning.

Pay Per Click

This provides you with high search engine positioning, perhaps even the #1 spot for the terms you have chosen, but at a very high cost. What happens here is that you get a high ranking in the search engines but you are charged every time someone clicks your link. It does not matter if the clicker is a 12 year old kid or perhaps even your competitor trying to drain your marketing budget, a click is a click and you are charged for it. Recent studies indicate that the number of “actionable” sales resulting from these clicks is less than 2%. So how much is it really costing you per click that generates revenue for your company?

Now the change that I referred to earlier. In an ideal world, you would have a site that gets very high search engine ranking and positioning but not because the page PAID to be there, it is done with search engine optimization. The pages are ranked very highly (usually within the top 4 non-sponsored listings for most telecom terms). And the code behind the page does as much as it can to weed out the bogus leads so that what you are left with is a laser-targeted lead specifically looking for the products and services that your company can provide.

Best of all, there is no cost to you unless a lead results in a sale. How much positive impact would that have on your marketing budget?

That ideal world is here now. Embrace the change that is here in terms of how leads are obtained and the change in not paying for a lead unless it results in a sale of your telecom related products and services, and discover how this can make a tremendously positive impact on your marketing budget and your bottom line. Visit VAR Sales Partners to get all the details.

Telecom industry to boost sales with Business Intelligence :

Telecom industries are faced with the huge challenges of ever changing market conditions. They therefore need information to anticipate these Changes and quickly make informed Smart decisions.
Decision-making in the telecom industry today demands high-quality intelligence. This is where business intelligence (BI) solutions play their critical role.

Any business can be successful only if the sales end is strong.
The same holds good for telecom industry, especially with telecom service providers.
Here with telecom service providers Business intelligence plays a large role in making profit because it deals with large amount of customer data .
Hence getting this customer data in a useful format is “Business intelligence”.

As mentioned previously for any business to be successful sales plays a very prominent role and sales always is supported by strong marketing practices.

Well next question would be how is this possible?

Some of the focus areas are:

· Providing strong marketing support.

· Sales Analysis

· Improving customer loyalty services.

· Building customer retention models.

1.Providing strong marketing support:

To give a good marketing support it is necessary to understand the market well. Having a good strategy is the foundation for a strong marketing.

Two basic Strategies, which can be pursued, are:

. General strategy
. Customer strategy

General strategy

Companies here comes up with a product, which is common, and try marketing to the masses. Advertising plays a major role here. Even though this has been a major practice, profit margin out of this has been very low, because individual needs of the customers are not taken into account.

Customer strategy

Basically understanding the customer needs and tailoring to their individual needs have overcome the disadvantages in general strategy. Thus business intelligence plays a major role here by analyzing the customers that optimize profits by nurturing value added customer relationships.

Thus strong customer relationships are attained by customer centricity: Customers drive business, thus understanding the customers plays a very important role.

· Customers’ requirements
· Customers’ expectations.
· Customers’ changing behavior pattern

Thus by understanding the above points it is possible to build a strong customer strategy model.

This customer strategy model directly influences

· Product pricing / tariff plans

Product pricing plays a key role in pushing business, by understanding
the customers it possible to categorize them into different groups based on their needs . Thus pricing can be decided by striking a balance between customers group needs and profits to the company.
This can also be easily tested with help of business intelligence – by implementing the model for a trial period and comparing the sale figures it is possible to get the profit margin.
By business intelligence useful information can be provided to different departments for making the right decisions with in very little time thus analysis becomes easier and designing the product pricing(tariff plans)becomes efficient.

· Advertising plans

Advertising plays major role because major money is involved in this.
Thus channeling advertising according to customers is very important. Since it conveys the right message to right mass and this can be achieved by profiling the customer’s data and checking their behavior patters.

This can save lot a revenue, thus any saved revenue is profit for the company.

2. Sales Analysis

Analysis can be in terms of

· Customers
· Performance
· Revenue
· Volume
· Margin

This can be viewed in terms of reports or charts thus competitive plan can be developed .
By this analysis any strategic decision taken by management will be based on proof and not by just guessing and thus can also predict the performance of the company for the next quarter or so.

Improving customer loyalty services.

· Fraud control
· Call records
· Billing and other services

Fraud control

With Business intelligence it is possible to track the pattern of calls their duration etc thus any abnormalities in call pattern can be detected.
Thus timely intervention can reduce the loss to the company.

Call records

With Business intelligence it is possible to view call pattern and possible to understand their call history. Thus it becomes easy to get any records of particular customer or a group of customer with common call fashion.

Billing and other services

With Business intelligence it is possible to send e-bills to customer on related dates without any much manual intervention and get customer billing of web will also help customers view their own bills and analyze the same.

Thus by getting in more related services it is possible to get more customer satisfaction thus improving business.

Building customer retention models.

Customer retention is one of the major challenges faced in any industry.
In case of any business it is said that retaining a customer is always cheaper than getting a new customer.
Here with help of business intelligence it is possible to build certain customer retention models basically looking customer data and their call behaviors.
A well-designed customer retention model can reduce customer churn to greater extend .The positive impact of this can be huge ie a small increase in customer loyalty can deliver a large increase in profitability. Businees intelligence can also identify the behavior looking at the customer data and business analysts can say who are customers likely to leave and take the appropriate action in advance.

On a conclusion we can say that business intelligence if properly implemented and used in the telecom industry it can help in boosting the profits to greater extent.