Webinar Transcript

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Dan Baldwin: Hello, this is Dan Baldwin again, and we are at Shootout #2. We have our 2nd shooter, Greg Plum, the Director of Business Development for The Conference Group. Greg, thanks for being in our white label conferencing program shootout. Go ahead and take it away.

Greg Plum: Alright Dan, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I’ve got my boxing gloves on and I’m ready to go. Okay, so a little bit about us. The Conference Group is a full service provider conferencing provider. We’ve been around for just over 10 years, and I’ve been sitting in this seat as the head of the channel for those 10 years. We’ve been working with Dan and Telecom Association for a good bit of that.

So, what we’re going to cover today. I know that the main topic here is white label and we will cover that, but I am going to talk about some of the other areas where I feel that we differentiate ourselves and why you might want to consider working with The Conference Group.

1:01 So, by the time we are done here, there are 3 main questions that we are going to have hopefully answered effectively.

Number one is, “Why should you decide to work with The Conference Group? Why become an agent of The Conference Group?”

Number two is, “What do we offer? What services do we provide to you and your customer base?”

And, number three is, “How do I go about doing it?”

You’ve made the decision. Okay, this is great. I love what you have to offer. You sound like a nice enough guy. Let’s do business together. How do I go ahead and actually provision the account and work with The Conference Group? We are going to cover all of those.

Okay, first off, some of the options that we offer to our agents. Buy rates are competitive. We are not known in the industry as the rock bottom or least expensive conferencing option. However, we are certainly competitive with what we offer. We do have a buy rate model. We do not pay percentages. It’s a buy rate, and it is “Evergreen“. So for as long as your customer that you bring to us continues to bill, you continue to earn revenue.

2:07 We do have private label programs that are more of a reseller program than an agent program. The way those work, we pretty much set our partners up as a standalone entity. We would give them a block of codes that they would provision at will. We don’t have to know, nor do we really want to know the identity of the users. We prefer to keep that between the reseller and their client.

What we will do on a daily basis is we will send a billing fee through, our usage fee right from the bridge, that they are able to build into their billing platform. At the end of the month we bill a wholesale rate, and the reseller will go ahead and bill out at their retail rate, and obviously they keep the difference.

3:00 As far as what we do with our agents, full marketing and sales support. Now what I mean by that is we do have a dedicated support team. Unfortunately, we are not here 24 hours a day, but we do have customer service that is here 24 hours a day.

So a customer, if they are ever in a conference, they will hit star 0, 3 o’clock in the morning, they will get a trained, and not only trained but a tenured, operator. The average tenure of our operators right now is between 5 and 7 years, so there are no inexperienced people on the floor, which would tend to make a big difference when selling our services versus our competitors.

We do have several online ordering options and provisioning options, which is really what I am going to focus on today, because when it comes to a conference provider we all say that we do it better than anybody else. But, let’s face it, it’s a conference call.

What really makes things different with the way we differentiate ourselves is trying to make it as easy as possible for the partner to actually go ahead and book business with us, and get the customer billing and generating revenue as soon as possible. And the flexible provisioning, we are going to cover that, some of the online tools that we make available.

4:20 Okay, so overview of some of the services. I am not going to cover this in any detail at all because as I said, the conference providers in the space today, there is very little differentiation going on as far as, “How is my conference call different from somebody else’s conference call?”

So top level, the services we provide are audio services obviously. Reservationless is certainly our flagship product, the bread and butter product, where it’s just like everybody else, available 24 hours a day. They don’t have to schedule it in advance.

We do have a fairly comprehensive international platform. Right now it’s, I believe we are hovering in the 65 to 60 number range where we have toll free numbers from that many countries directly into our bridges.

We do offer an online conference manager, where the customer can schedule conferences if they chose to do so. They can view their usage. They can control a call while it’s in progress.

So if they prefer to use an online tool as opposed to using the star commands, we make that available to them. It’s all included in the same per minute cost.

5:33 And then we also have free recording and playback. What we would do following a conference is send them a summary and attendance report and that will include a link to an MP3 file that they are able to download and do with as they please.

Of course as every other capable conferencing company out there, we do have the full service of operator-assisted conferencing products, again with 24/7 support.

Now, here is a little bit of a difference for us of late. We’ve had the ReadyShow brand for about a decade, just pretty much since we opened our doors. It historically had been focused on the LotusLive product which is obviously an IBM product, which previous to that was a Web Dialogue product.

Well, it’s still the same product, but it has gone through various gyrations and has morphed into the current platform of LotusLive Media and LotusLive Events. We continue to offer that. But what we’ve done is we have actually expanded ReadyShow to be more of a suite of products.

6:37 That includes LotusLive of course, and we’ve added to that Microsoft Live Meeting from an additional web product, and we have added 2 video options. MegaMeeting is one we brought on about 1-1/2 years ago, and we are just now bringing on video, which is getting a lot of press, a lot of good press because of the quality of the services it offers.

So when you think Conference Group, my goal is for you to think basically anything that you need in the way of conferencing, audio, video, web, we pretty much cover everything.

Here’s where we won’t go. We don’t do the full blown room systems. If you wanted to have the high definition telepresence experience where you have the $100,000 room that’s configured specifically for a video conference, that’s not where we go.

We’re a CSP, a conferencing service provider, that is morphed and changed with the industry based on the needs, and those needs pretty much brought us current to getting, I guess, the latest and greatest of MegaMeeting and the video products where it’s video. However, it desktop video.

7:45 But the video itself, the video product, does actually scale up to HD quality. So, we pretty much cover the gamut from the plain Jane reservationless conference, and that’s what that card is right here where your slide is, just a reservationless conference, all the way up to the higher end of the services, the video products where it has the multi-point live streaming video with the web built into it.

This is an example of the attendance report I mentioned before. It’s obviously just a sample. It just has a line that dials in. But, what is important about this one is, this right here is the link to the mp3 file. So, a customer will get this, again at no charge. They are given the recordings right away.

Some providers, believe it or not, are still charging $20.00 for a CD, and they are having that shipped out. We have completely abandoned that model because we just found it not to be cost effective really for us or for the consumer.

8:48 Okay, now the biggest differentiator. Here is where I think The Conference Group stands apart from some of our competition. As formidable as it is, and if you dial in on the others you will hear very capable stories and they have done a very good job, but here’s something where what we’ve done is pretty much differentiated. We do not require contracts. For our regular audio services there is no contract required whatsoever. Everything is web based.

So what we would have you do is, as an agent we would have you actually fill out this form that you are looking at, online obviously. You fill out the client information, the desired services, and the price. So you have a buy price. Let’s say your buy price is, oh I don’t know, I’m going to use a fake number since we aren’t going to talk numbers.

Let’s say your buy price was 10 cents a minute, and you said, “I’m going to sell it for 20 cents a minute,” so you would tell us on this form, this service is going to be charged 20 cents a minute. We take it, we fulfill it, we set it up, we send out the fulfillment within a matter of hours, and you’re copied on everything that goes out to your customer. This would include that plastic card that you saw earlier, the conference card. That’s okay. That’s not where we stand apart.

10:04 Here’s where it starts to get a little bit different. We have an instant passcode engine that we built for our agents, and this is one version. Obviously, this has The Conference Group look and feel to it where you would direct your customers to this deal from a website.

And here you say, “Sign up for conferencing now.” They click on it. It takes them to this page. The customer fills out all the information. They put in a credit card. We will automatically validate the card, hook into the bridge, send them their welcome information, and they have their codes and they are on the conference in minutes. That’s one of the areas where we’ve kind of changed the game a little bit.

One thing that is important is, how do we do this for our agents? Well, each agent will get their own unique link. It will be identified by those X’s. It’s basically similar to an affiliate tracking code that many online retailers are using today.

11:01 But our latest, this ties in more with the white label component, is this page. You will notice it’s not really branded The Conference Group. It does have a Powered by The Conference Group, and there is a reason for that. Since the credit card bill is going to indicate that the charge coming through is from The Conference Group, we feel it is pretty important to communicate that to the client that it is powered by The Conference Group.

The customer fills this form out again just like they would the other form. Hit submit. When they do that it automatically will fulfill, and I will show you what that fulfillment looks like in a second.

Now, let’s say a customer gets to this point and they realize they are just not comfortable putting in their credit card. I certainly understand that. Right up here in the upper right-hand corner is an invoice option. The customer will click on that button. A different form would pop up, and it will allow them to actually request services just as they would on this form, less the credit card.

What we will do is, we will handle that as though you had requested it, and we will set it up generally in the same time frame, between 4 and 24 hours they are being set up. I say 24, but it’s often much quicker than that.

Now, what does the fulfillment look like on that? Here is the welcome. You will note it’s an automated engine, and we do not currently offer the ability for this self-fulfillment to be branded for our agents.

12:36 If branding is of the utmost importance, and that’s the model that you want us to follow, then I would suggest our reseller option which I touched on briefly where we pretty much set you up with your codes, and you are free to run with that as you see fit. We are there to support certainly every step of the way, but it’s much more we are in the backend. The end user will never know that The Conference Group is behind it.

So this is what the fulfillment looks like for the instant pass code. That is the confirmation page that pops up on their computer. This is what the e-mail looks like. Very, very similar. I know it’s small, but just to give you an idea. This is all of their access information and their passcodes, and they will get that instantaneously, as soon as they sign up for the account.

Now when we get it, at that point we turn around and send it out to our agent and say, “Hey, by the way. Your client set up an account with us and here’s their information.” Now, that’s it as far as my formal presentation on The Conference Group, what we have, and how to do business with us.

13:48 What I would like to talk about, I’ll open the floor to questions, I did want to talk a little about a question that people really aren’t answering today is, “How do I sell conferencing?” That’s what I get more than anything else when I travel to trade shows, when I’m talking to my agents.

The biggest frustration that they have is not their provider. It’s not their channel manager. It’s that they haven’t identified a need. So, I think that is one area that could really be developed and result in incremental revenue for everybody involved. Simply asking for the sale. So we will talk about that in a second.

But first off, I would like to thank everyone for their time and open the floor to any questions that you may have.

14:40 DB: Greg, I do have one question.

GP: You’re always good for a question, Dan.

DB: Now, a lot of the customers may want to have access to the reports if they are doing quite a lot of volume or they are doing any sort of departmental billing.

If an agent signs up as a reseller, and you said there was same sort of co-labeled option as a reseller, if the customer then goes in to pull their reports or what have you, or pull down their billing information, does the co-label, the agent/resellers logo appear on that report engine?

GP: It doesn’t. With us we pretty much grow a firewall between the 2 types of partners. We have agents obviously, and then those that want the true private label which is a reseller where literally we are just an engine behind it. The reseller does all the marketing. They even do the billing.

So what we’ve done to kind of gray that line a little bit is create the co-branded page that you saw before, the ordering page, that allows the agent to actually have an “ecommerce” kind of approach to how they are offering the services.

16:04 What that does for them is since it’s an instant passcode page, what it allows them to do is market the services in a different way. They can put that link in their signature line of their e-mail. They can put it in newsletters. They can put it on their website. Any way that they are marketing themselves. Social media. It could be put out there, and there are many ways to take that online tool and make it work for them.

As far as the reporting, for an agent that sells, what we do is we communicate two things on a regular basis. We will send them their customer’s usage. So every single month you are going to get, here’s what your list of clients are broken down by client. Master agents is another thing to consider talk about. But we would break that out obviously by subagent, each of their clients, their client’s usage.

And then the 2nd report that they would get, we actually pay our commissions biweekly. So what we’ll do is when we send out the wires, we send out the commissions via wire transfer, when we do that we send out a commission report that’s going to detail what constitutes that commission payment.

17:19 But we do not send daily reporting to an agent. That would go to a reseller. And the same goes for when a client goes to look for their usage. That would be that conference manager we discussed earlier, where they would have the ability to go in and view a call, schedule a call. We do have that ability to brand that, and it can be completely private label. But again, that’s more of a reseller model as opposed to the agent model.

Does that answer the question? That’s a long answer to a pretty short question.

DB: It does. Thanks. Do you have, it’s in your presentation, but for someone who is listening to this recording and they want to follow up, do you have some samples or website that you can offer up. Say, “Here’s what a website looks like. This person is recently a conference group,” or, “Here’s a website where this is the co-label,” so they can see the difference between someone who is reselling Conference Group or someone who is simply co-labeling it?

18:18 GP: Boy, you really put me under the gun here. Yes, I do have that.

DB: I mean, if you do it in some kind of confidence.

GP: See, with something like that I would say contact me, because I don’t generally make those. And if it’s a reseller, the answer is absolutely not. We don’t share that for obvious reasons. We want to protect the integrity and the identity of our resellers.

But as far as the agents go, some of them believe it or not, they are really skittish about our marketing because they are saying, “Well, we hear you’re telling my competition what I’m doing.” So, I would say anyone that has questions on that, my contact information is on the screen. I am happy to address it, and I can. I do have some that would be okay with it, but I’d rather not put it out there on a recorded archive that we have no control over.

DB: Here’s my last question. Just so we know, the resellers that are selecting The Conference Group, what kind of businesses are they? Because clearly they’ve made the same decision that people listening to this recording are doing. They’ve already looked at the competition and they picked you. What sort of businesses are they that they decided The Conference Group was the best for their resale opportunity?

19:34 GP: I would say our most successful resellers are really marketing companies that have branded themselves as conferencing companies. It’s not so much the agents having done that as much. The agents that have been very successful are perfectly happy to maintain that transparency. They let The Conference Group do what we do best, and they don’t worry about hiding that identity.

But, as far as those that are focusing on the private label component, it really is these are companies that have sometimes come out of the woodwork and turn themselves into multi-million dollar companies, as literally a marketing company that sees an opportunity that conferencing is the way to go.

Now, I do want to say that some of our most successful agents, the way they have become successful with us is by taking this technology that we are making available, these tools that we are putting them in their hands, and actually using them.

20:34 The vast majority of our agent community, it’s there, they don’t take advantage of it. They are still doing business the old way. So I would say the recipe for success is to not only just know that these tools are out here and appreciate it, but use them.

DB: Use them in conducting their own business.

GP: Absolutely.

DB: So then your resellers, in addition to being high-powered marketing companies, they have to have a little bit of their own ability to do IT, feel the web page, put in some forms so you can get the process going, right?

GP: Absolutely. I mean the whole point of this is we made this, and I don’t mean this to sound, well, I won’t say it – not sure if you want this in here? we made it as simple as possible. We wanted to make this to be zero barriers to entry for an agent who wants to sell the services. Now, it gets right back to what I started to discuss briefly before I opened the floor to questions.

21:30 What makes the difference? How do you become successful in selling this? And it’s simply asking the question. The vast majority of the agents out there are selling other services, and when it comes right down to it they are walking out the door without asking that customer what they are doing for their conferencing. If they did that, guaranteed a certain percentage of them are going to convert and turn into additional revenue.

DB: So, the agents that are being successful with The Conference Group, are they selling conferencing to their existing customers? Or is this all green field, they are just going out and cold calling?

GP: Good question. The majority of those that are more successful actually do it because they are focusing strictly on conferencing. Those that have conferencing in their toolbox will set up an account here and there. Maybe a few accounts a week. Those that focus on conferencing, and that’s there bread and butter, they are setting up several accounts a day.

DB: Okay. By marketing into their existing base, if they have a big base, maybe they are an equipment provider or just by making cold calls to prospects likely to do conferencing like accounting companies, insurance companies.

22:40 GP: Yes, it’s the latter. It’s the latter definitely. They are going out with e-mail campaigns, telemarketing campaigns, search engine optimization. They are using the technology, today’s technology, and just going out and that’s all they focus on.

DB: They are just busting ass selling conferencing.

GP: That’s what it is. I mean they’re not selling it as a sideline. It becomes their core business. And when it is their core business, they certainly make a decent living.

DB: Great. This is Dan Baldwin, Telecom Association. Our Shootout guy #2, Greg Plum, the Director of Business Development for The Conference Group. Greg, we are out of time. We’ve got your contact information up here. We strongly encourage anybody listening live or listening to the recording to contact Greg to learn more about what makes their most successful agents and resellers successful. Give Greg a call.

GP: Wonderful. Thanks Dan, appreciate the time.

DB: Alright. Bye.

GP: Bye.

To take advantage of this white label audio/web conference calling solution for your telecom agency or VAR equipment customers please contact Greg Plum at 877-716-8255 x8268 or Greg.Plum@ConferenceGroup.com.

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