Webinar Transcript

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00:01 Dan Baldwin: Hello, this is Dan Baldwin. I am the Telecom Association Executive Director. I want to welcome everybody to our very first Solution Shootout. This month we are doing white label conferencing, and our very first shooter today is Herb Levitin, the owner, president and CEO of WholesaleConference.com. Herb, thanks for showing TA members what you have to offer in this shootout. Go ahead and take it away.

Herb Levitin: Thanks, Dan. Well, I want to first of all, those of you on the web conference, you can see my video camera. I am going to start recording this and put it up on my blog site, and you will hear, “This conference is being recorded.” And, I will also bring down my web cam because it doesn’t tell you any information. I am just going to close it down for a second.

00:57 So, the first thing I am going to do is a standard PowerPoint presentation. It is only 6 lines. The first one says owner conference service company. I do believe we have a different offering than the competitors in that I’m essentially putting people in a business very similar to if you owned InterCall, or you owned Premiere Global, or if you owned Citrix or WebEx. I’m giving you an ecommerce site that is 100% branded with toll-free conferencing with branded web conferencing.

Let me go ahead and advance the slide. So the branded ecommerce site is a complete solution. It has advanced web features such as live conference viewer, and reporting features that my large clients really desire. We know we close large accounts because we typically save a large account 3 days of labor a month. That is really the selling value versus trying to sell on price, although our price is very attractive.

02:04 The product you are looking at today and is being recorded is a 3rd generation product. There is no software download, so it’s superior to WebEx, and superior to my competitors who are using an IBM product, and superior to Go ToMeeting Citrix.

We also, when I say it is a complete site, we process credit cards, and we have produced branded invoice. We also have 24/7 toll-free service. We do entire back office support for a complete ecommerce site that does everything for toll-free and web conferencing, and the client does everything themselves.

So we don’t expect resellers or clients to fax things around to us, or call us, or e-mail us. They have a log onto your branded site, and they do everything themselves. Because of that power given to the client, there is very little churn. We actually don’t have churn. We grow doing nothing every year.

03:05 We’ll advance to the next slide. And this idea was actually, I want to thank Dan Baldwin, it was really his idea that agents don’t have a lot of marketing wherewithal, so we are providing branded marketing also. It’s going to be on the client’s, the resellers branded site, and you just send out an e-mail blast just with a link, or you can actually download each e-mail doc and then put in your own e-mail hypertext, graphic e-mail if you wish.

And we also have a blog and put out reseller news and let all the resellers know what is working for other resellers. So, our infrastructure is unique. We are old school guys. We do have a lot of VoIP bridges, but none of them are used on the toll-free. They are only used on the free conference side or the flat rate side.

04:11 So, we only use Spectel bridges, the highest quality raising TDM with a tier 1 carrier. We have no complaints whatsoever from clients on voice quality, and there actually is going to be, I think this month later on in Phone+ magazine, there is a 1-page article coming out I wrote about voice quality and conference callers.

So we have redundant the bridges. We have redundant DS3s. We are in the most secure site in the world in Las Vegas, and we are in many other sites, and we have multiple redundant web servers. We have never gone down in the 7 years we have been in business, and we don’t expect to.

That’s the next slide. So, besides all the free stuff we are offering, there is even extra value. We offer resellers that are selling flat rate toll, and they are paying whatever they are paying per month for so many seats, we are offering that at no cost. We have thousands and thousands of ports available, and we are just trying to encourage resellers to move to us.

We also provide you sales engineers to demonstrate and close large accounts or small accounts. And we use your branded site. We become your CTO in effect and do the presentations with your brand.

05:36 The other thing we are doing is we are advertising for small bases. It turns out that Premiere Global and InterCall will grow by acquisition, but you have to be fairly large, billing 5 million minutes a month. So there is a market that is untouched for small agents and resellers that want to be acquired, and we refer them to our resellers.

We also have another company we work with that will loan you 100% of base with no personal signature. It’s collateralized on the base. So if it blows up they take the base, they don’t take your house.

Part of our software, we spent years developing our software. We have real-time sales reports. If you’re nervous in the middle of the night, 2 o’clock in the morning you get up to look at what you’ve done so far this month, or this day, you can see exactly your sales to the penny.

And the client, of course, can log on to their own account and see exactly what they spent so far this month, along with summary reports after each event conference call. Multiple people get a report e-mail of the conference call.

06:50 And the last slide just shows you how to learn more. Go to www.wholesaleconference.com. Telephone number 805-845-8906 or herb@wholesaleconference.com.

So, I am going to go ahead and share my screen now. Remember this is being recorded. I will post it on my site later.

And the first thing I want show you are some of the features. When I started the recording, that was that button there. We have advanced telephone controls. We can mute the conference which I will go ahead and do now. (All callers are muted and may unmute themselves by pressing Star 6). I’ll unmute it later.

So I am going to go ahead and pick a window here. It’s on a different screen. This window has 3 tabs. So this is our brand, GoConference, that we developed the software around. Some resellers actually started as agents and decided no, I can make more as a reseller, so we have 8 seats available to the go conference. I’ve got 2 other tabs up here. Let me highlight them so the 2nd tab is end conference and the 3rd tab is create conferencing.

08:10 So, when you become a reseller, and just click on this end conference, the site looks similar, but the information is different such as this owner you can contact directly his toll-free number. One thing I want to point out that each one has a branded web conference site, just like the site you are on now. Click on that web conference and up comes a branded Sun Conference website.

Trial memberships are free by the way, so you can have your clients try this for free and we don’t charge you anything at all. And a lot of resellers are actually using that to train their new clients and sign them up. When you click back to go conference and you see that the click on web conference and go conference and it’s a different brand. It’s the site you are on right now called GoWeb.

I’m going to click on the 3rd tab, and that’s a reseller called Great Conferencing. They have slightly different information, and their web conference then again is branded Great Conferencing.

So the branding is 100%. It will never say Go Conference or Wholesale Conference anywhere. Even the credit card transaction is on a different domain called Secure Call. So, when people get the credit card charges, it will say Secure Call, and there is no website for that.

09:45 I don’t have all that much time. There are a lot of features I want to go over individually, but it’s too much detail right now as far as the billing, what people have. But, I assure you that what we are offering for free is way advanced with what everyone else offers in the industry right now. And all at no cost.

Let me stop sharing and go over a few more details of the features of the web conferencing. Now, notice on the top left where it says wholesale conference. Each moderator can put their own logo in.

So if you sell to a client, say Telecom Association, they can put Telecom Association on the top left-hand corner private brand. We have a white board here, and it’s persistent which is unique. We’ve actually marked this up. Create a new white board, call it #2, and we don’t shut the meeting down. It will be there when we come back to the meeting.

11:00 We do some things with this offer that no one else does. One of them, there is a library which is unique, so you don’t actually have to load software on any computer. You don’t have to take your laptop with you. You can, for example, be on vacation in Rome and someone wants to do a sales presentation. Your library will have a sales presentation. So, I just brought up this sales presentation from my personal library, and there’s also a public library.

We also do still pictures, JPEGs. I’m bringing up a JPEG now. And remember, we are recording this, so everything you see on the screen, everything you hear, we play back. And the uniqueness about our recording, other products out there you have to download this 50-megabyte file, special software and firewall issues.

Our software works exactly like YouTube. You send a link to your client and they play it, just like a YouTube video, except it can be an hour long.

11:58 So, I just brought up a picture of Santa Barbara, and I can show you where my office used to be. Right there. There are 4 types of files that you run. So, it’s still pictures, PowerPoint we ran before. I’ll bring up another one. And I can promote someone to be a presenter, and they can advance the slide. They also can mark this up. And the type of content is an mp3. If your speaker is turned on and during the playback you will actually hear this song. So it just started playing when everyone is speaking. I’ll stop that.

And the 4th, let’s go to the white board. The 4th type of file you can share is stream video. This is really unique. Let me clear the screen here. This is taken directly from YouTube, so this is a streaming video of Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, and it’s the same exact quality as YouTube. I took it from there. We can manipulate it to full screen, and smaller again.

13:30 And, what’s unique about the software is you freeze frame it and it synchronizes everyone’s picture, so when I mark it up the marker will be in the same slide, the same frame as everyone else.

I am going to unmute this. (All callers are unmuted) And, I want to see if there are any questions. Anybody have any questions.

DB: Herb, this is Dan. Do you want to talk about how are the people billed for this? I mean you bill them and they bill their customers? Or they have to set up credit card, or you set it up for them, bill stuffing? Whether they have to prepay or post-pay? Because a lot of the agents are not familiar with reseller billing.

14:20 HL: We do everything for the reseller. And we have many, many resellers. Some do their own billing, but most of them don’t. So, all the credit card transactions we do for you. All the agent has to do is find the client, go create 1 simple screen, put the credit card information there, and that creates a new client, and then create a conference room or multiple conference rooms, and we encourage the agent to do that.

The first couple times we do it for them with the client online. After that they use their free web conference account and show their client, because what you are doing in effect when you are showing the client how to use you software, is more people realize that there are a lot of features in there like live conference viewer.

And, they see the web conference, so they will probably sign up for web conference because it is so easy to use. I if they are used to WebEx or Citrix they have to download software first, and if you notice in this one it is just click to a screen and you just to go in any website.

15:20 And, an agent or reseller can also choose for larger clients to invoice them, and we generate color invoices with their logo on it. We actually print them out, stuff the envelope, and mail it to them. Now the remit address will be at the agents or resellers address. So we generally have a combination. A certain percentage of clients are being billed for credit card, and certain for invoice depending on the size of the client that you get.

When I say we do everything for the client, we actually do everything. All you have to do is find a client and sign them up, and show them how to create a conference room or create a conference room for them.

DB: So there are 2 main differences between being an agent of a conferencing service like your Go Conference and then being an owner of Wholesale Conference is a buy sale rate, so certainly you are going to keep the difference, and then the other thing is the agent/reseller has to set up the customer’s conferencing and then show them how to use the conferencing service. Whereas if they were an agent, they just send you the order, you set it up and then you show them how to use it, right?

16:40 HL: Right. And it turns out although I will do all the new setups for new clients, it’s so easy to do, it’s so intuitive that the resellers want to do it themselves. They want that personal relationship. And that’s the beauty, they can do it themselves. I don’t know who the client is, it just shows up. I get a notification whenever a new client showed up. It tells me what reseller it is. But it turns out in reality the resellers log in as themselves because it is so simple to do.

DB: Now can you spend just 1 or 2 minutes saying what sort of agent/reseller is the most successful at this opportunity, and what sort of customers, or existing customers are in their base that they will be selling this to?

HL: Well, the most successful resellers are people that are selling associated services like voice over IP and they have to abate the client, and they just sell them any kind of product. Prior to this they were either referring conferencing to someone else or just selling to a different competitor and they brought it over so they just keep on selling every day.

18:00 I have other agents that work by themselves and do search engine optimization and add 3 or 4 new accounts a day. They know how to do the search engine optimization. It’s still a one-man show, but they are growing really fast.

So I have agents for Go Conference, they concentrate on really large clients and consequently billing in the 200,000+ minutes a month and another $2,000 or $3,000 dollars a month in web conferencing. And, we price the web conferencing so low, and most of the agents I say, “Look, price way below market because you are still making a huge margin.” Because you want to use the web conferencing as kind of a lost leader to get the toll-free conferencing. That’s where all the money is.

18:50 You still make a huge margin on web conferencing. My rate is so low, I don’t want to talk about prices, but if you contact me at Wholesale Conference then I will send you an agreement, and you will see how low the price is. Way below market. It’s hard to not make money. And consequently you won’t get priced out of the market down the road.

DB: Now one other benefit of being a reseller, even if people don’t want to be a reseller if they are big into selling conferencing and they are selling maybe one of the big services, InterCall, PGi or what have you, at least with your resale product you are not going to be competing against your own provider, where you sell a big InterCall or PGi and the next thing you know InterCall or PGi retail person is telling your customer that they can get them a better rate.

19:50 HL: Right, and WebEx does that all day long. You sell a client to WebEx you just gave the client away, besides not making much margin. So there is a lot of benefit of selling your own product, but in the past you are looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars investment to do this. It was just prohibitive.

Even today, my competitors are not offering fully branded, it’s no cost to get into the business, and we are expecting people to sell it because if you are building your own business versus doing someone else’s business, no one knows who your clients are. They are not calling on them.

DB: And this is not Mickey Mouse stuff. This is 3rd generation technology which some of the biggest conferencing providers aren’t even using.

HL: Right. This is the latest software. You know this, but most people listening don’t know that I’m also the president of the company, and we work some large distribution channels out, and this will be pretty mainstream in about 18 months.

20:50 Major carriers will do it because they can’t make money with a WebEx either selling it. And of course they are giving away their end-users which they don’t like doing like anyone else, to WebEx. So, you can get in ahead of the curve here. Regardless, my selling price is so low you are never going to get priced out of the market. It’s impossible.

DB: Great. Well Herb, we’re out of time. Why don’t you give everybody your contact information one more time.

HL: It’s www.wholesaleconference.com, and people who are watching on the screen you can download the V-card. I’ll leave the site up for a while. I am going to stop recording here in just 1 second. (Conference recording has stopped)

To take advantage of this white label audio/web conference calling solution for your telecom agency or VAR equipment customers please contact Herb Levitin at 805-845-8906 or herb@wholesaleconference.com.

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