sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Question for installers...

Sort of. Yes, I have a system that is still on the drawing board, but this was less about choosing wholesalers over installers than seeing if installers want to sell equipment.
From some of the other message chains, it didn't seem like some would be willing to recommend a new product - particularly an IP product- to customers, and I assumed that these installers would most likely already have exclusive partners (ie Avaya, Nortel). Which made me wonder if there was a space of installers that wasn't partnered with an equipment provider yet, but were still willing to recommend/sell systems. The other alternative was that people who are not partnered did so by choice and focused on the service side of the business.

Hope this clarifies things. The message chain has been pretty much what I was looking for so far - which was your professional opinions.



[This message has been edited by PaulPM (edited July 18, 2005).]

I would say both sell and install. Heres why:
It really depends on your market share. IF you mainly do small business its really hard to compete with some of these ebay prices. So if a customer calls us and wants us to install there own equipment, sure we will do it (work load permitting) on the pretense that they will deal with whom ever they purchased the equipment from for warranty issues or buy replacement parts from us. Now if you deal mainly with large business then this can go one on two ways. If your in a large enough market to handle the quotas imposed by major brands Great! Sell away. However if your market area cannot handle the quota's of distribtorships then why not partner up with a national distributor of a product and be there installation crew in your specif area. In most cases it gives you the advantage of access to thier nation tech support as well. Everyones got thier own opinion and this is just that. My Opinion.

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When all else fails, Give someone else a try!

From some of the other message chains, it didn't seem like some would be willing to recommend a new product - particularly an IP product- to customers...

From my perspective an IP product is another ball game. Personally (and this may be the feelings of others here) I would not want to get involved with IT people or their networks in order to do my job.

I think any IP based product is intended for IT people anyway so any marketing should be aimed at them. They won't need us to install, administer, do MAC's etc. so don't bother us with it.

-Hal

[This message has been edited by hbiss (edited July 18, 2005).]

I was approached by a local company that has various locations back east as well as two local locations.

The IT lady is in charge of telephones. She obvouisly wants an IPX so she can remote administer.

IP is a fancy toy at this junctor in my location. Most of my customers are POTS and sets.

The largest IP system is a contract correctional instituation. Every time they add a set they have to shut down the system (Windows based). The system, as any computer system, has a high failure rate. (Why else do you need full time IT people on board?). The warden has had nothing but heartburn trying to run this place without working telephones.

Do I really want to get involved? No, BUT---, I know people that can get this done but it will require the convergience of more than one type of system as well as VoIP.

Just remember, MOST IT people want it to look like a duck, walk like a duck, quack like a duck (because that's what they are used to) but want it to work 5 9s and actually WORK. You can't have it both ways.

So now that the IT people are done standing on our telephony shoulders and are "years ahead" I guess I can retire.

Here, someone elses' turn on the soap box -----

I'm mostly looking at customers that don't have in-house IT staff. Likewise, I would think that they would call a "phone-guy" instead of an IT consultant when they wanted a phone system/upgrade/repair.

Am I missing something? I would think that significant installation is still required even for an IP-PBX system. For any solution, locations w/o IT staff would need lots of assistance too - cabling, setup, equipment, the whole nine yards, and probably not have many networking issues (since their data infrastructure wasn't big enough to need an IT staff in the first place).

Even though there is a lot of service that should be done durring an installation, the biggest service you can do is train the customer. The customer can buy the best "box" in the world but hate it because they don't know how to do simple tasks with it.

When we have installed systems sold by other companies, they wanted us to hang the box on the wall, connect the wires and leave. They did not want to pay for training or anything else. The labor rate they paid was lower than our already low rate. Nobody benefitted but the seller.

As far as new products go, we are always looking for new stuff that we can offer our customers to better their lives. For us, it is not about how much we can make on a product but, how does it improve things for the customer. We realy enjoy hearing back from our satisfied customers and they pass the word on to others.

Bottom line, I prefer to develope a good customer relationship than make $2.50 on a day's work.

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I'm mostly looking at customers that don't have in-house IT staff. Likewise, I would think that they would call a "phone-guy" instead of an IT consultant when they wanted a phone system/upgrade/repair. Am I missing something?

Well, yeah. First, because they are a small company they probably wouldn't be a candidate for an IP based system to begin with and would balk at the cost anyway.

Gotta remember that the cost savings for an IP system (if there really are any) is because the company won't need us anymore since their computer geeks will handle everything. No geeks= no savings.

Another point to consider is as I pointed out above, are you a network guy and would you feel comfortable reconfiguring something that is as important to most companies as their phone system? Small companies usually have an outside consultant to handle their IT issues, do you want to be responsible for finger pointing and his service calls because they blame you for screwing something up on their network?

Not me, you can have it!

-Hal