Why should you trust one of the most important decisions for your business with an independent telecommunications agent instead of a direct sales representative from one particular company?

1. You get to hear the truth!
When you use an experienced Independent Telecom Agent, you tap into a wealth of knowledge and experience of someone who has been in the field for many years and has experience working with multiple carriers. An agent will have experience dealing with most of the carriers in your market and can tell you how they really perform. Who has the most reliable network? Who has billing problems? Who is going bankrupt? Who can make the desired install date? When using an Independent agent, you don’t have to listen to “The Company Story” for each carrier, as they always tend to dress up their deficiencies. You get to hear the truth.

2. Guaranteed best combination of price, product, service and support
Since Independent Telecom Agents work with multiple technology service providers, they can essentially guarantee their customers the best combination of price, product, service and support. If you work with a direct sales rep from one company, you only get one offer, from their company.

3. Agents are invested in a long term relationship with your company
This is an incredibly important concept to understand when choosing to use an Independent Telecom Agent! When you work with a direct sales representative for a telecom company, one that may be here today and gone tomorrow, they are paid only to bring in the sale. There is absolutely no incentive for a direct sales rep to ever speak to you again after you sign the dotted line. It’s sad but true. However, because Independent Telecom Agents are paid by commission only and on a residual basis, their entire business model is based upon building a portfolio of happy, long term customers.

4. Telecom has become commoditized
Standard telecom contracts are 36 months.  Smart businesses will renegotiate their terms every 3 years to reduce rates and reevaluate the new options available to them.  However, this can become a daunting task to perform – even more so if you actually switch providers every 3 years.  However, a good Independent Telecom Agent will proactively take this task for you and help you decide what’s best for your business when your terms are up for renegotiation.

5. Same pricing
The same standard pricing model is used for both the Agent Channel as well as the direct channel for every service provider. In spite of all of the additional knowledge you can tap into with Independent Agents, you can be sure you are not charged any extra for it. It’s an incredible model that helps the customer and insures all clients are treated equally.

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Gartner, Inc. is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.

Recent research shows that:

• 60% of all small-medium sized businesses close within 6 months of suffering a major loss of data
• 72% of all small-medium sized businesses close within 24 months of suffering a major loss of data
• 60% of all data is held on laptop or personal computers
• A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds in the United States
• 2,000 laptops are lost or stolen every day
• 63% of all small-medium sized businesses do not follow best practices to ensure their data is backed up
• 22% of small-medium sized business users admit they never back up their data at all

Your company’s data is critical to your success, financial stability and the security of your workforce.  If you aren’t taking any steps to secure your company’s information, or if you are not following today’s best practices to ensure your company’s data is safe, you are literally playing Russian Roulette with the future of your organization.  Technology enables today’s market to provide small-medium sized businesses with many affordable, safe, secure, reliable and easy-to-use solutions that can put your mind at ease and, more importantly, provide your business with the type of data safeguards that you need.

Call or email me if you are interested in learning more about how Converged Technology Solutions can help.

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David Coursey with CIO Magazine recently penned this article at cio.com: http://bit.ly/cNX30e

How much bandwidth is enough for your business? I enjoyed reading this article about bandwidth needs for today’s businesses. I have been in telecom for my entire post-college career with progressive experience in network operations, design, engineering, implementation, field services and senior management. I think that the article is probably fairly accurate by default – 5 mbs speeds should suffice for most businesses – however, it’s an awfully broad statement.

I still see a lot of companies with 10-20 employees being successful on a single T1 while some similarly sized companies would not dare entertain a bandwidth less than 10mb. I very rarely see a company with 50+ employees using anything less than 10mb unless they are in a very remote area where bandwidth of that size is not accessible. The differentiating factors that typically come into play are: cost, up/download speed differentiators, stability and of course end user application. You can get 10mb up/down for the same price today that a T1 cost 10 years ago. A T1 converged with 6-8 telephone lines is cheaper than a DSL with with the same 6-8 telephone lines was 4 or 5 years ago. Another thing that businesses should strongly consider is the commodity nature that bandwidth has become. Businesses should never sign more than a 2 year agreement and should shop their service every opportunity they get for better combination of price, product, service and support. If a business owner has had the same service provider for the past 6 or 7 years, chances are they are paying WAY too much for less service than they could be getting from another provider. Loyalty is out the window these days when it comes to bandwidth. Again, overall a good article and a good read.

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