TA Week-in-Review 7/17/9 Video Script

Hello, this is Dan Baldwin, Telecom Association Founder and Executive Director and this is your video "Week-in-Review" for Friday, July 17th 2009.

The past week's been a great week in Telecom Association-land and not because of my pending RV family business trip to Lake Tahoe & Yosemite but because at long last TA's publishing it's first premium vendor profile and because we've finally upgrades our home page at www.TelecomAssociation.com. Other stuff happened too that I'll tell you about shortly but first the important stuff.

Ok, now this is important, when I count to three I want you to put me on pause and then click on that really good looking guy Ron Ireland with the orange background three columns to my left. When you click on Ron you'll link to TA's premium profile of TMC to learn about TMC's 7 competitive advantages or sweet spots as well as hear testimonials from agents about why they do business with TMC over other vendors. Don't forget to come back and listen to the rest of me though.

OK, 1, 2, 3.

Hey, wasn't that great? I bet you didn't know all that about TMC Communications did you?

I want to thank TMC's staff and their Sales VP David Schwartz for helping me pull that profile together. It took a lot of work but it certainly worth it because it's specifically designed to give an agent a quick understanding of what TMC's good for - from an agent's point of view.

Pretty cool, huh? TA's going to do that with all our vendor members over the next year. Over the last three months we've collected a ton of video and now that we've got our "premium vendor profile template" complete with TMC we're going to start rolling them out pretty quick.

What's the key you ask for putting together a great vendor profile? Interviewing the agents who think a vendor is doing a good job. It's my firm belief, as an agent myself, that almost every vendor out there is "the best" at something (or agents wouldn't be doing any business with them at all). Believe it or not though, most vendors don't even know what they do best - but their agents do - and that's why we're interviewing as many agents as we can get on the phone.

And that's how we're getting all our agent testimonials.

If you scroll down below me you can click and listen to several agent testimonials for TMC right now. That's how I learned that the new KOR-IP VoIP service TMC is rolling out, especially their hosted VoIP service, is going to be a winner for TMC.

Which reminds me, I sat through an hour-long webinar on TMC's new VoIP services and you should listen the the recording too. Give TMC a call at 866-999-1133 and let them know you want to view the KOR-IP webinar recording. A very credible master agent whispered in my ear this past week that you all will be selling TMC's flavor of hosted VoIP or competing against it this year or next.

So anyway, how about this new Telecom Association web site? TA's had a website for 13 years and I must say that this is the best and most organized that it's ever been. Let me give you a quick tour of the 6 different main parts.

Column number one here above & below me will hold member opinions & agent interviews.  This will be my favorite column because, like you, I'm very interested in what successful agents (and soon to be successful agents) think. Here's where you'll find out what's going on day-to-day in the real telecom selling world.

Column two, the next one over to my left is the "superstar column" where you'll read about agent best practices and how to become a telecom sales superstar. How do we decide what the best agent practices are? We interview telecom sales superstars of course. If it's been done, and it worked, and we find out, you'll read about it in column two.

Column three in the middle of the page is where you'll see all the TA vendor email blasts to learn about hot new products or special price and commission promotions.

Column four is where you'll find out what the vendors are really good at and why you'd choose one vendor over another by digging into the vendor profiles & interviews.

Then column five to my far left will be where you can learn about our newest vendors that you may not yet know a lot about and also read telecom industry headlines.

Then finally, all the way to my left, your right, you'll see sponsor banner ads. When I made this recording we had the Atomic8Ball ad on top - call them if you need help with your website or email newsletter

Under that you'll see the banner for the IT Expo in Los Angeles this September 1st through 3rd - the mega telecom solution show - we'll be there and we look forward to seeing you there.

And under that you'll see a banner for FreedomIQ, the hosted VoIP solution providers that expect to battle TMC's hosted VoIP solution for supremacy over the next year.

Of course the most important part of our new web site is the "join" link you see in red above me just to the right of the TA logo. If you're not yet a TA member click the join link and join right now. It's free and you'll then be in the good company of TA's 3,500 other members.

So where are we with this Week-in-Review?

We covered the TMC Communications premium video vendor profile & the tour of the new TA web site.

What else?

This week we've posted part 4 of our 7 part video interview with Braun Mincher of PCG Telecom. If you've not viewed parts 1 through 3 click the link & start watching. Braun's our telecom reality show agent. He's already made a million bucks in telecom and now after a 5 year break he's coming back to do it again. Watch the video series to learn what he's thinking and how he expects to do it again. Braun's really a nice guy. I actually come up with the corny "How I Got Rich in Telecom" headline to get you guys to click on it.

What else?

World Telecom Group's fiber vendor AboveNet did a webinar a week ago on "Dark Fiber" I sat in on that seemed pretty compelling. If you need a great fiber solution give Vince Bradley's people at World Telecom Group a call & ask them to forward you the link to watch the webinar on AboveNet's dark fiber.

Coming up?

Well today, Friday the 17th the Technology channel Association or TCA is having a webinar for members on "Channel Manger Best Practices" at 1:30 pm Eastern. You can get more information on that at www.TCAsite.org.

This coming Thursday on July 23rd AboveNet is having another webinar on "Next Generation DIA: Metro IP". To get in on that webinar contact WTG at WTGcom.com and ask to get a reservation for the AboveNet webinar.

Finally, next week is supposed to be the big roll-out for our new merchant services and payroll vendor EPS. A lot of agents have been asking for other business services they can sell to their existing customers and EPS has it in a big way. Every customer of every TA member has a payroll and EPS will be able to save your customers on their payroll expenses as well as their merchant services. Stay tuned for that big roll out.

Speaking of roll-outs, I'll be rolling out of Southern California next week in a 30-foot RV with three teenagers and TA president Nancy Baldwin. Of course it'll be a work trip for me as I try to conduct business on the road with my brand new Google Voice number (try it out by calling 951-251-5155), my rented Verizon broadband card and a whole bunch of other telecom "road warrior" gadgets I'll be testing out.

Talk to you from the road next week. Until then take care of your customers and call all your prospects about the benefits of business VoIP before some other TMC agent does.

See ya!