Best of Salt Lake City & Denver
TA's 2009 Preview

I never really thought about Salt Lake City or Denver being a hub of telecom activity. When people call and ask me where the USA’s telecom "agent hotbeds" are I usually say there’s six:

California, Texas, Florida, New York metro, Chicago metro & everywhere else. Well I now need to officially break these two Rocky Mountain cities out of "everywhere else" and call them "the Mountain Empire" because there's really a lot going on telecom-wise in and about Salt lake City & Denver.

(For those of you I visited in Portland & Seattle last month we're going to break you out too and call you the "Northwest Empire")

Salt Lake City, Utah

1. Ken Krogue and Danny Gardner of InsideSales.com.

InsideSales.com positions itself as the leader in B2B phone dialer solutions for sales professionals who sell remotely. As multi-location contract and send their best people home to sell from home offices, InsideSales.com enables their inside sales supervisors to maintain high productivity from the remote sellers through InsideSales.com's service that includes a predictive dialer, SalesForce.com integration as well as a dozen or more other inside sales productivity tools. Agents that want to get back to selling "fat margin" services need to take a good look at InsideSales.com's solutions.

2. Jim Gledhill, Richard Murray & Tim Ruff of CarrierSales.com & Telecom Recovery.com

CarrierSales.com was formed in 2001 when a collection of independent agents pooled their experience and resources to form one of the largest agencies in the country. Today, CarrierSales represents AT&T, Qwest, Global Crossing, Level 3, XO, Integra, TNCI, Paetec and a number of smaller carriers and resellers.

Telecom Recovery.com is an industry pioneer in the rapid recovery of communications after a telecommunications outage, with a unique focus on the restoration of the incoming calls to existing phone numbers. With Telecom Recovery’s Voice Recovery Service™, complete control of incoming calls to all phone numbers can be restored in only minutes, allowing callers to be handled in almost any way imaginable, and enabling quick adaptation to changing circumstances on-the-fly, even while calls are in progress.

3. Mark Koon of ABS Telecom

Since starting in 1995, ABS Telecom has become one of the most well-rounded and complete telecom solution providers for enterprise customers available in the United States. Based in Salt Lake City, ABS provides solutions for voice, data, internet and cellular from coast to coast. ABS represents a broad range of carriers, from the largest national provider all the way down to the local CLECs. 

4. Tom Milligan, Ed McGarr, Jon Heaps, Dave Chytraus, Tracy Thayne & Barbara Comish of inContact (formerly UCN)

Primarily created for inbound call centers with 10 or more seats, inContact® is a suite of on-demand contact handling applications designed to significantly enhance the customer contact experience, boost agent performance and increase profitability. inContact removes the barriers to contact center excellence by delivering a comprehensive, flexible platform to connect your customers with the right agents on time, every time.

5. Adam Edwards & Patrick Oborn of Telarus & ShopForT1

Telarus is a commercial master agency that specializes in creating tools that agents, customers, and vendors can use to do more business together. Some say Telarus is more of a software company than a traditional telecommunications master agency, as ALL of their applications are written in-house. Key differentiators that seem to distinguish Telarus from their master agency competitors include GeoQuote, Lead Generation, VAR Network & Back Office Software.

Denver, Colorado

6. Sandy Spencer, Amanda Jardine & Kay Olsen of Qwest 

Everyone knows Qwest as the "800 pound guerilla" in the channel industry. Whether you sell for or sell against Qwest you simply can't ignore Qwest. I got to meet Sandy Spencer for the first time on my visit and learned things about Qwest and Sandy that I did not know. It was quite enlightening and I look forward to sharing it in my in-depth spotlight of Qwest.

7. Shawn Fischer of Bandwidth Builders

Along with Tony Cheng's NetStar, Bandwidth Builders is part of Dave Laskowski's CTG3 empire. Bandwidth Builders primarily makes Qwests residential products available to be sold to end-users through Bandwith Builder's subagents which are mostly Internet service providers ("ISPs").

8. Rich Gannon, Steve Seymour & Claudine Flores of XO Communications

Like the Seattle XO team I interviewed last month, Rich Gannon's Denver team follows Tom Gorey's lead to position XO as the "local CLEC to beat" in Denver. Their unique position is that even though XO is nationwide they compete like locals in every local market and know how to beat the locals at their own game.

9. Ron Dunworth, Hilary Fox & Steve Mercado of Advoda

The Advoda meeting was one of the most eye-opening for me. In addition to being one of Qwest's biggest Colorado master agents and a master agent for & TMC, they've got something really special going on with their enterprise customer facing, multi-vendor project management tool. While many agents focus on small customers, Advoda appears to focus on the needs of enterprise customers and their need to constantly be informed about the status of hundreds of MACD ("move, add, change, disconnect") orders in play at any one time. Advoda has 15 employees in their office with three computer monitors each that seem to do nothing but ensure everything is known, managed, monitored and reported about every order in process - kind of how NASA would do telecom project management. An extremely impressive operation!

10. Tatiana Finkelsteyn & Scott Mills of IQ Wired

Braun Mincher of PCG said I had to meet with Tatiana of IQ Wired when I was in Denver as she has one of the best "Telecom Sales Success" stories he'd ever heard of. In addition to building IQ Wired into one of Colorado's biggest Qwest master agencies, IQ Wired is "THE master agency" for Cbeyond. In our interview Tatiana suggested that the success she's achieved was unforseen at the beginning. She says that she arrived to the US from Russia speaking very little English. She initially tried to get a customer service job at Cbeyond but there were no openings so she nervously accepted a sales title. She admitted to being too scared to do anything in the Cbeyond sales job other than the strict activities mandated by the "Cbeyond sales model" like: knock on "every door on every floor" and "don't come back without 50 business cards". The Tatiana/Cbeyond chemistry appears to have worked because she's certainly not scared anymore and is considered an opinion leader among her peers.

11. Devi Jaspal of Intelisys

Where Qwest is perceived as the 800 pound guerilla of the carrier space, Intelisys is similarly thought of in the master agency space. Intelisys has more employees than any other master agency I've run across and they are getting into businesses that kind of blow your mind when you ask, "How is that related to classic master agency?" While still doing master agency well, Intelisys has evolved into whatever comes after master agency and Devi Jaspal is at the tip of the Intelisys spear with her Intelisys Business Solutions division. The customers of her division are medium and enterprise customers as well as resellers and carriers. Agents looking to climb "up market" with larger, multi-location customers need to get to know what Devi's division does. Fortunately I videotaped Devi explaining it all very neatly and concisely. We'll publish this video shortly.

12. Jeffrey Pearl & John Scarborough of IP5280

This is another meeting recommended by Braun Mincher of PCG (Thanks, Braun!) Every now and then the right solution finds the right sales powerhouse at the right time. Hosted VoIP plus Jeffrey & John equals "High Definition Voice". I'm not sitting in their meeting room more than 10 seconds when I realize that I'm not going to hear the normal, tired hosted VoIP pitch. First off, Jeffrey & John are both wearing suits, ties & cuff links on a 90 degree muggy day in Denver. "That's just the way we roll," was Jeffrey's polite explanation. the next thing out of Jeffrey's mouth is, "Hey Dan, check this out ..." He then walks over to one of their demo phones, dials a number, hands me the receiver and invites me to "listen to what a high definition phone call sounds like". Wow! It reminded me of the time in college when my roommate invited me to use his high-end headphones to listen to the water sounds on his new "Rush 2112" album - it sounded like there was a clear mountain stream running through my head. More about Jeffrey, John & IP5280 in TA's full report but let me say that IP5280 has figured out how to sell hosted VoIP. I wanted to buy it!

13. Carolyn Bradfield, Sarah Deathridge, Traci Rigano & Alycia Maier-Turner of Copper Conferencing 

Copper is doing a good job of getting agents re-interested in conferencing. My own point of view is that the big heydey for conferencing was several years ago, that's when myself and many agents were making big bucks with the fate conferencing margins. Over the past couple years though conferencing's margins have been beaten up and the service seems like a commodity. "Not so", says Copper CEO Carolyn Bradfield. "Conferencing's only dead to those agents and master agents who are not working it," Bradfield claims. "Conferencing is a staple communications tool of American business and agents not aggressively trying to pick up this business are allowing other competitors into their accounts." Copper is positioning their turn-key embedded base marketing program for master agents as their key competitive differentiator.

14. Anne Guenther & Brad Dupee of InterCall

Is the biggest the best? InterCall thinks so, at least when it comes to audio, web & video conferencing. Just when you think conferencing is getting too boring to keep you awake it seems to come alive again. TA is glad to have conferencing become such an active vertical and is eager to see how InterCall provides value to agents and customers commensurate to its marketplace size.

15. Tomas Yanez, Ryan Siemer, Troy Knuckles & Dale Kammerich at tw telecom

Rumors have it that tw telecom is one of the premier providers of business Ethernet in the US. And according to this press release from earlier this year, "tw telecom has built an impressive national fiber footprint that can directly reach two-thirds of U.S. businesses. tw telecom has increased its market share among businesses and continues to be one of the top three providers of Ethernet connections to business customers." We look forward to learning more about and reporting on this.

16. Alison Haynes of Level(3)

After taking the time needed to fully digest their Broadwing acquisition, Level(3) appears to be ready to move full steam ahead to recruit top quality agents every quarter. TA looks forward to learning more about Level(3)'s plans so we can share the plans with our members. Stay tuned for more news.

17. Hollie Clere of Clere Communications

Hollie has put together and trained a great support staff for those agents and providers that need help staffing or outsourcing order provisioning and project management. Everything that needs to happen for an agency after the signature of the contract, Clere Communications can do. As well, Hollie and her staff are able to grind out the auditing needed from a customer's current bills to prepare a great proposal.

18. Braun Mincher of PCG Communications

I've met a lot of people in my day who label themselves "entrepreneur" but none who seem to fill that title as completely as Braun Mincher. While most telecom agents and channel partners dream of selling their telecom business at the end of a nice career to "live happily ever after", Braun states that he did it in 2004 at the tender age of 30, after having been successfully involved in several other startup businesses before venturing into telecom auditing and IP-PBX VoIP (Altigen) telephony. I first made contact with Braun nine years ago back in 2000 when we named Braun "Agent Member of the Month" in our Telecom Sales Journal #8 (see pages 15 through 19). Anyway, now that his five year non-compete clause has expired he's ready to "do it again" in that he plans on building a second successful telecom business this time centered around auditing and hosted VoIP. As you will be able to see from the video series we've done on Braun, Braun is the perfect subject for TA's version of "Telecom Reality TV". Braun has graciously accepted TA's offer of chronicling his efforts to build a successful telecom agency from scratch. We look forward to what we'll learn.

19. Tom Cross of OCS Forum

Tom Cross has been contributing content to TA for over 10 years, first with TECHtionary.com and now with OCSforum.com.  Tom's specialty is taking complicated telecom concepts and breaking them down so that salespeople and their prospects can easily understand them. Tom is also a big advocate for Microsoft's OCS platform and believes it will win out over hosted VoIP and other IP-PBX platforms. If you want to learn more about OCS visit OCSforum.com.