Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

New Manager

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 11:03:34

It doesn’t necessarily follow that just because you’re great at your job, you’ll naturally make a great manager. Management is a learned skill and if you can understand a few of the basic principles you will get off to a great start. Here's my top five;

1.    Feedback. There is a very small, very old book called ‘The One-Minute Manager’ - read it. Try catching people doing things right to start with. Focus on what happened rather than your opinion. “I listened to that call and your approach immediately calmed him down. I think this was because you…” Avoid ‘yes-but’ feedback. “That was really good but maybe if you…”. If this becomes a regular style, employees ignore the positive start and brace themselves for the negative punchline.

2.    Coaching and training. Your most important job as a manager is to improve the people working for you. Introduce regular and well-planned training that addresses the knowledge gaps of your staff. Don't just use ‘chalk & talk’ training. Get people involved and regularly test their learning. On skills, you need to agree a framework of feedback and learning both on-the-job and in the classroom. This is most relevant in sales where observation and role plays are far more effective than PowerPoint slides and ‘watch-me’ coaching.

3.    Mood. Displays of emotion are often counter-productive because they undermine your message and authority - if you lose your temper you lose the argument. I often see new managers adopt a deliberately surly demeanour as a defence mechanism and a badge of authority – this is a mistake. As you develop as a manager you will become deliberately more vulnerable. This opens up more space for creativity, employee development and good decision-making.

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Topics: Business

What can hosted telephony resellers do about Teams Phone System?

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:51:41

There are plenty of doom-mongers around Microsoft’s recent incursion into the cloud PBX market but little practical advice. If you find yourself competing with Teams Phone System, here are three things to consider;

1.   Be prepared. Microsoft list only 22 inclusive features of Phone System on their web site and they don’t appear to offer optional extras. If you currently charge for some of their standard features, you may initially feel a little disheartened. However, many features you offer, and your customers need, may not be there. Put together a competitive matrix for your salespeople and their customers. Include the range of devices you offer vs Microsoft approved devices. Make sure your salespeople understand Office 365 pricing. Phone System is available with only the more expensive licenses and at time of writing is not an upgrade on Microsoft’s most popular 365 licence, Business Premium. Build a price comparison table into your Features Matrix. As Microsoft expand their features update your sales team.

2.   Focus on SMEs. Due to the level of licence and technical skill required to configure Teams Phone System, it feels as if it would appeal more to bigger companies. It has always been hard to sell a hosted cloud product to really large organisations. Yes, they benefit from not having to have a PBX in every office, but at a certain size it’s often cheaper for them to buy their own cloud platform. Because it is an upgrade to expensive Office 365 licences, Teams Phone System may be less attractive in the SME market, which is the sweet spot for most hosted providers and where the average sale is still only seven seats.

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Topics: Microsoft Teams

Motivation as a process

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:47:46

Someone shared a ‘guru cartoon’ with me today (please stop blind-sharing these self-absorbed phoneys), where the message was ‘be happy’ – genius! Of course, we all want to be happy but someone shouting it at you will usually have the opposite effect. Most of the stuff these self-styled ‘experts’ churn out is like Usain Bolt’s coach telling him to run faster.

The reality is that over the longer-term, people motivate themselves and it’s our job as managers to create an environment for them to do so. How?

1.   Take care of the hygiene factors i.e. remove obvious demotivating factors from the environment. If employees know that others are doing the same job as they are, but getting more money, they are justifiably pissed off. If they have a two-hour round-trip to the office just so you can watch them work, you lessen their commitment, and their respect for you. Be flexible and help them to spend more time working in their unique ability.

2.   Define success, measure it, and let them get on with it. Some of the annual objectives I have seen senior managers set are laughable and amount to no more than a task list (I remember ‘attend training’ was one). Objectives are numbers that relate directly to successful outcomes, that your business can measure and report on. Ever had a KPI that when you get to appraisal time you both realise has not been recorded because the business just cannot collect that data? 

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Topics: Business

Product Development

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:43:55

On average, Jola launches two new products every month. It’s true that some of these are product extensions, but they are all projects requiring a plan, specification, funding, coding, collateral and training.

This is how I think we do it.

1.    Agile, agile, agile. We re-evaluate and re-prioritise every week in a two-hour meeting that includes all the senior stakeholders. We consider every project, regardless of where it is in the process, and we add placeholders for ideas that are either embryonic or ahead of their time. As market conditions and customer needs change, we accelerate, slow down, hold and re-prioritise. We are ruthless, we kill, and park ideas and we don’t invest in marginal vanity projects. We own our own software development resource so we can stop/start projects, and we don’t produce exhaustively detailed specifications.

2.    Fill the hopper. Product development cannot be a serial process. So many companies bet the farm on a new product and when conditions change, that should question the original business case, they soldier on regardless – because there is no Plan B. At Jola we have run out of letters for plans. As I write there are 29 products in the development process, 15 with ‘Go’ status. We do not limit the number of projects going into the hopper, and if we have too many projects with equal priority, we get more resource.

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Topics: Business

Hiring sales people – five tips for a successful recruitment strategy

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:41:04

Salespeople are like hotels in Monopoly. Buy as many as you can afford because the more you have, the more income you generate.

Of course, it’s never as straightforward as that. Under-performing sales people are a drain on management time and your biggest mistakes won’t even pay for themselves, let alone make a positive contribution to gross margin.

This is why you need to be hiring all the time, especially if you are a growing business in a growing market. If you wait until the position comes up in the budget, or you lose someone, you are likely to miss the best people. Moreover, because you’re a little desperate, you are likely to compromise, take a risk, and make a bad hire.

Continuous recruitment requires a strategy. The objective is simple; whenever a person that fits your target profile starts to look around, they must know about, and consider, your company. Achieving this is a little more challenging.

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Topics: Business

Encourage positive stories about your company

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:38:04

I first encountered the concept of corporate stories when I went to school, and then worked, in the USA. Here are two examples.

Nordstrom – these guys love to encourage tales of heroic customer service and this one is my favourite. A man goes to one of their stores and complains his relatively new tyres have worn too quickly. He has lost his receipt but regardless the store agrees to refund him the cost of the tyres. Weeks later he finds the receipt and returns to the store. “I’m so sorry” he says, “I’ve just realised I didn’t originally buy the tyres from Nordstrom”. “I know” says the store assistant, “we don’t sell tyres”.

Dominoes– a store in San Francisco ran a promotion. They would refund your money if for any reason you were dissatisfied with the pizza they delivered. A customer ordered a pizza every few days, ate it, and then claimed a refund. This continued for several weeks until the local Dominoes invited him to come in and prepare his own pizza, exactly the way he wanted it. This he did, ate it, and then asked for his money back. They refunded him, no questions asked (and then quietly withdrew the promotion a week later).

I told the Nordstrom story to my Customer Service Manager at Griffin and challenged him to implement a sustainable process (arguments rage as to whether the Nordstrom example is good or bad in the long run) that would create a positive story . He actually did two things;

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Topics: Business

Q. What’s the biggest waste of time and money in your business?

Posted by Andrew Dickinson on 30-Sep-2019 10:32:26

A. The deals you don’t win.

I’ve been selling IT and telecommunications most of my working life. With an average close rate i.e. qualified prospects:order of around 5:2, you could argue that 60% of this time has been wasted. Of course, that’s just sales; but who doesn’t want to improve their hit rate?

Here are some thoughts.

Benchmarking. AKA using a competitor’s price to drive down the price of the incumbent, but with no real appetite to change supplier. The prospect won’t say they are benchmarking because you will either decline to bid, or put in a below-cost price just to screw with your competitor. Regardless of what you are told, when you are bidding to replace an existing service, its usually benchmarking. Whatever problems the prospect tells you they have with their current supplier, moving away usually involves cost, disruption and risk. Don’t attribute a high percentage to these tenders, or if you think they may be genuine, try and verify this by networking in the account. If you are selling through channel find out if the reseller has an existing relationship with the end user, and what their average hit rate is.

Networking. With social media platforms like LinkedIn it has never been easier to network in target accounts. Keep digging around until you find someone you know, or at least someone who knows someone you know. Your objectives are to confirm the veracity of the enquiry, get the inside line on the real problems you need to solve, and to find people who can influence the decision in your favour. I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but it still happens to me so…Do not immediately IM contacts that accept your invitation to connect, with a pitch. Imagine you are trying to entice a squirrel to come over and eat out of your hand. If you go charging towards them brandishing your nuts, they will run up the nearest tree, and you’re an ex-connection.

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Topics: Business

Microsoft Office 365, Teams Phone System and UK Charities

Posted by Cherie Howlett on 25-Sep-2019 10:57:44

There are around 200,000 charities in the UK, employing nearly a million people. This sector has been a conundrum for the IT channel because, whilst there are opportunities for professional service fees, ongoing revenue and margin are depressed by heavily discounted licenses and low commission rates.

For example, Microsoft’s E1 license is free up to 2000 users and E3 is only £4 a month. To add Phone System to either of these is only £2.40 but at £9.10 pcm (and no reseller commission), resellers and their customers have been put off by Microsoft’s Calling Plan (needed to make and receive calls outside the Teams environment).

Now resellers of Jola’s Direct Routing call plan for Teams can offer their non-profit customers the full suite of Office products, including Exchange, Teams, Phone System, and Unlimited UK calls at a competitive price.

Not only will the customer save on the rental of a traditional/hosted phone system, they will also no longer need telephone lines or ISDN.

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Topics: Microsoft Teams

Manageable Mobile Data for European Retailers

Posted by Cherie Howlett on 18-Sep-2019 12:01:52

Retailers want fast, reliable, cost-effective internet connectivity in stores for EPOS till systems, kiosks, advertising screens, WiFi etc. They often use 4G as a back-up to a fixed line primary circuit, to ensure business continuity.

MSPs want to win retail bids for European technology roll outs. 4G is often a small element of the bid, but can cause Project Managers headaches, when dealing with multiple in-country suppliers, manual ordering and no visibility of data usage. They want full control over every element of the roll out.

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Topics: Multi-network SIMs

Pay-per-GB

Posted by Cherie Howlett on 04-Sep-2019 11:21:41

The opportunity

4G devices that roam in the EU, such as 4G WiFi routers in yachts, need to connect to the strongest 4G signal available. According to recent European Boating Industry statistics, there are over six million recreational craft in EU waters at any one time.

Devices that always need connectivity, such as monitoring devices inside containers, need SIMs which provide users with good connectivity, wherever they roam. There are over 20 million shipping containers worldwide.

PPG

Pay-Per-GB SIMs are un-steered, so have no preferred network, and connect to the strongest 4G signal available. These SIMs connect to multiple mobile networks in many EU countries. Resellers only pay the standard per GB price for additional roaming data, above the monthly allowance.

PPG SIMs offer resellers and their customers a much more flexible and predictable cost when roaming in the EU. Even if the primary and secondary network fail, a multi-network SIM will continue to operate seamlessly.

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Topics: Mobile SIMs, mobile data

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