sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information New product line needed

Whar are the feelings about different manufacturers. We are in a bad position as an interconnect, we lost our Dealership for Vodavi and our secondary manufacturer Advantage (LGE) closed up. I'm stuck. Have looked at Win, Comdial, ESI, Telrad, Arista and others. Any suggestions?

Too bad about loosing the Vodavi dealership, they have a great product for the price - and they are building a solid name. Well, my personal feelings are as follows (though others will differ):

Win: Ok product but really has no name attached to it.

Comdial: Well, who knows they may weather this storm....but current sentiment is that they are not going to be around much longer as Comdial. Sure the DX-80 will still be with us but it will be a purly Vertical system (those are my thought anyways).

ESI: Again, a fine system, and they have a pretty good name on them, but there are better things out there IMHO. But I have to say, out of the less expensive products out there they are pretty nice.

Telrad: A ok product, but for the price that people pay there are better systems out there, again IMO.

Arista: I am not familiar enough with them to comment.

To add some:
NEC: A good product, but there are FAR too many dealers around.

Panasonic: Same as NEC with the dealers.

Nortel: Again, like NEC with the dealers, but costs more for what you get.

Avaya: Like Nortel they cost more for what you get out of them. However, they have a name with them - good or bad.

Tadiran: Solid pgoduct, but can be costly if the application is not there.

I am sure others will have differeing opinions, and that is great! We all have our own! :)I am sure there are some great manufacturers out there that I am not listing!

Good luck and do not loose hope, everyone has rough times!
Steve

DWM
Give TransTel a call distributor is located in Jupiter, I like the product and have several choices in KSU's
1-800-872-6785 Heres link to brochure.
https://www.transtelcommunications.com/main/freedocs/dl/TransTel-TDS-Brochure.pdf

May I asked what happened to Vodavi?

Larry:

Apparently, Vodavi has been strictly enforcing quotas lately. They used to be very relaxed and understanding when a dealer might have a bad quarter or two. This started a few years back when the company went public.

They have also been cracking down on dealers that sell restricted items on the Internet, e-bay, etc. or directly to non-authorized dealers. They are trying to keep their products from becoming like Panasonic where every Tom, Dick and Harry can get their hands on it. I guess I can understand their position on that.

DWM, I am really sorry to hear that this happened to you. It's really a shame that they are doing this because I think everyone ends up losing in the end. I mean, how are you supposed to support your base of existing customers that have Vodavi systems?

I knew of a dealer that actually was allowed to miss quota for almost two years and they still allowed him to stay. That was back in the day when Vodavi was still a private company.

Take a lood at Inter-tel. The encore CX is a hot system

Where is Trans-tel manufactured? I've never heard of them.

We sold Vodavi but wound up with the worse dork in the world as a sales rep. He got fired about a month after we stopped selling and I don't think anyone wanted him around. They have pretty good tech support but I thought the method of programing the system and the voicemail came out of the dark ages compared to everything else we had put in.

Samsung would let your quota slide if the local rep knew you were trying your best and came close. Then they got a cactus up the you-know-where and one dollar could make or break the discount. I had a quarter where I asked in an email what I needed to finish off the quarter, ordered that and then was told my discount had been lowered because the figure they gave me was wrong and I hadn't met quota. No one wants to be a Samsung dealer, they just want to sell the product.

Toshiba is great stuff but they have pretty well killed the gray marketing and unless there is no Toshiba dealer near you it will be exceedingly hard to get a dealership and they have high quotas.

Many many years ago, I sold Intertel until the factory people walked off with one of my installed customers, never sold a stick of theirs since.

If you like Vodavi, you might try convincing them to offer a smaller dealer quota if there are not a lot of dealers around. That would be reasonable and just. This one size fits all is not reasonable. Of course if you were selling $3K a month, then they would want you to sell the Graybar line, but if you were anywhere close, and your customers were not screaming at Vodavi corp, they ought to have the decency to negotiate something. Never hurts to use their toll free line to ask.

Look at ESI again, they have a real solid line, easy to install and maintain, a good name,pricing per feature can't be beat, their reseller program requirements and pricing schedules are fair, and the sales and tech force treat you like you are family. IMHO

Like a few others in here I think ESI is a good starting point for you. Since you are in South Florida which is a market ESI is interested in growing they would love to hear from you.

What about selling the Vodavi supply house line? You know how to program and install, there is no quota and who knows, with a few decent quotas they may change their mind and they may not but you don't know unless you try.

You could do what a friend and I did, form a partnership on paper, sell the same stuff, and be happy. Neither of us wanted to make the big quota, so we showed the dingbat company a bunch of paperwork and they shrugged and let us do it.

As silly as it may sound to you, sell a line of refurb stuff. My margins on refurb are much higher on refurb than on new (buying it right and not paying top dollar to refurb outfits) and there are a lot of people who want value with a warranty. I tell people that they can have a two year warranty on Toshiba because I am not taking a risk, so little of it ever dies that I'm happy to give a two year warranty on used Toshiba. That is happy news to them.