The Telecom Expense Management (TEM) Industry Has to Change Part 7: Message to Buyers
An 8-Part Series
The Telecom Expense Management (TEM) Industry Has to Change
Part Seven: Message to Buyers
The TEM Industry has to Change An Eight-Part Article Series
We’ll be publishing these eight articles between September and December 2022. Be sure to subscribe to AOTMP® Insights to be notified of the latest releases.
- So much has changed and yet so much has stayed the same.
- $4+ trillion in products, services, and solutions … a huge industry.
- There is a reason we can’t get more than a handful of $50 million plus TEM providers.
- Why is it that many other industries have gone from nothing to billion-dollar industries … but not TEM?
- The service provider environment – carriers, mobility providers and others.
- Call it technology, cloud, SaaS, network, or anything else … it doesn’t fix the problem.
- Why is there so much churn in this industry?
- We’re stuck in the past – the hamster wheel
- The impact of private equity – what it has helped and what it has not.
- Opportunities are everywhere … for businesses, for vendors and for financial partners.
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- When will enterprises place value on other aspects of TEM, and not just cost savings?
- Is there value on just having an accurate inventory?
- Is there value on just getting your invoices processed and ready to pay on time?
- Is there value on leveraging the buyer knowledge with seller technology?
- How do vendors better demonstrate value other than hard-dollar cost savings?
- A great presentation with not one word of hard dollar cost savings … would a buyer buy it?
- How do organizations like Salesforce or ServiceNow sell without a focus on hard dollar savings?
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- What must change in the selling and buying process?
- Procurement has a role, but it’s not to stop all communications between the buyers and the sellers.
- Communications must change, be more transparent and open throughout the process.
- The fishing expedition – why do enterprises send out 300 question RFP’s, make the TEM vendors jump through hoops, when they plan to stick with what they have, or they don’t even have budget approval?
- What do the vendors gain by pitching smoke and mirrors and saying they can do everything, even when they can’t?
- You’re looking for your 4th, 5th, 6th or even 7th TEM provider. Isn’t it time to look in the mirror?
- You’re pitching to an organization on their 4th TEM provider? That should prompt a different discussion.
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- Say What? The $30 million annual spender who saves $1 million each year. Soon it should be free?
- The more spend I manage, the more I need to charge versus the more savings I create for my customer, the better I am.
- My TEM provider is no longer saving me any money and therefore I can’t justify the cost and need to change providers? Is the provider doing a poor job or a good job?
- Save Me Money? Yes, but not so much that it makes me look bad.
- What do you mean you found me $5 million in savings? That’s going to cost me my job.
- The CIO of a $100 million spender who said “if you save me more than $1 million a year, you will be fired”
- It’s Ground Hog Day. I keep saving the same money over and over again.
- What about the root cause? Where is the focus on the core challenges?
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- When will there be real partnerships created between buyers and sellers?
- Why is it that buyers and sellers can’t seem to communicate at the first sign of trouble … and it only gets worse from there?
- When will the enterprises realize that there is no perfect solution in this very complex and difficult industry?
- When does an accurate inventory become the most important discussion point?
- Everyone wants a great relationship, but enterprises oftentimes don’t let the vendors talk to the business owners during the initial sales process. How does that create a foundation for a successful relationship?
- The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) … the focus needs to change. It’s not about all the great things we have done. We just love to drive from the rear-view mirror and you know how that ends up.
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- What is a Telecom and Mobility Management Center of Excellence anyways?
- Vendors and business customers really can work together to build a world class telecom and mobility management environment.
- Who are the critical stakeholders on the vendor side and what role do they play?
- Who are the critical stakeholders on the enterprise / buyer side and what role do they play?
- Telecom and mobility management functions don’t need to be the support organization in your company – position it to be a driver of business results.
- How do all parties show more value and contributions to the business?
- Quotes, recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- AOTMP®’s top five recommendations to buyers.
- Recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
- AOTMP®’s top five recommendations to sellers.
- Recommendations, or commitments from our sponsors.
Series Overview
AOTMP® is a 19-year-old company that has both vendor and business customers in the telecom, mobility, and IT management industry. We have been consultants and trusted advisors for all customers in the past. We have collected data from our database of over 100,000 emailable industry professionals. We know what works. We know what doesn’t. Today, AOTMP® is an information services company supporting telecom, mobility, and IT professionals across the globe through training, certifications, association memberships, events & programs, best practices, publications, resources, and professional development.
We see the great relationships. We see the churn. We hear about the great buyers and the unreasonable buyers. We hear about the effective and the ineffective vendors. We see the buyers who will never have a successful TEM program until they change internally. We see the sellers who will say anything and go beyond reasonable ethics to get a deal. We hear the vendors who say they have never lost a customer, yet we can easily dispute it. We see the enterprise buyers who put 100% of the blame on their vendor, yet the greatest challenge is within their own organization. We see the many happy relationships and we see the many relationships that just exist because it’s too painful to change. And we see the major investor wins along with huge investor losses in the tens of millions of dollars. We see it all.
As we watch many other industries become multi-billion-dollar industries, from the CRM industry to the bill payment industry to ITSM with ServiceNow growing to nearly $6 billion in 20 years, the TEM segment of our telecom, mobility, and IT management industry just continues to struggle. That’s concerning given the significant opportunities on both the buyer and seller side, which in turn drives the investor side. There are so many growth opportunities; however, they are offset by so many inhibitors. It all just says, as buyers and sellers, we just haven’t yet figured out how to execute. There is no reason we can’t work together and have billion-dollar telecom and mobility management vendors serving world-class telecom and mobility management Centers of Excellence, with both sides making a much more significant contribution to overall business results.
So, the question is how do we move the industry forward? How do we move to a new level? Or can we? If not, what happens to the industry? Does the waste and inefficiency just continue, and we live with it? Do we just continue to make marginal improvement? Do we continue in the very fast-moving hamster wheel we live in? After all, we do have a lot of great vendors and a lot of great buyer environments, but not enough to make an industry out of the huge opportunity sitting in front of our eyes.
Given the multi-billion-dollar industry opportunity, offset by the significant growth inhibitors, we had to do something. We had to start. It will be like moving a mountain, but for the good of the industry, we had to take the first step. We started with two articles, the first focused on vendor recommendations for buyers followed by buyers’ recommendations for vendors. Then, in July, we held our first Industry Solution Showcase where we re-imagined how buyers and sellers connect. It was a great success from both sides. Everyone is looking for something different.
Armed with all the insight and experience, and feedback from the first three initiatives, we decided to author this eight-part article series, not to just point out all the challenges, but to bring awareness to all the growth opportunities right in front of us if we can work together to affect change. It must start somewhere, and it starts with one vendor and one buyer, then two vendors and two buyers, and builds from there.
You can follow along with the eight-part series in our AOTMP® Insights publication. And you can be assured there will be more initiatives to follow. It doesn’t stop here. Already in planning are initiatives at our annual AOTMP® Engage conference, potential webinars, and promoting Industry Value Challenge submissions we mention and receive throughout the Series. And there will be plenty more.
Given what we have seen in the industry over the years, along with what we see and hear today, we believe the greatest opportunities for growth for both the vendors and the businesses lie in five core areas. You will see this theme throughout the Series.
Message to Buyers
As we bring the Series to a close this month with Part 7 – Message to the Buyers and Part 8 – Message to the Sellers, we thought we would use the two articles to make a few recommendations based on what we see from both sides of the market. But first, as a reminder, we have included insights in every article addressing areas we believe have the greatest opportunity for growth for vendors and businesses. Several months later, these opportunities still hold true and we don’t see them changing in a significant way anytime soon. Having said that, we have seen a number of businesses and vendors take these to heart in their own organizations and they have begun to change their views.
Improving the buy and sell process.
Agree to open and transparent communications throughout the process, regardless of the issue.
Developing stronger vendor – customer partnerships.
Problems are going to happen; commit to focusing on solutions, not penalizing each other.
Focusing on value beyond cost savings.
Help each other identify, quantify, and realize value beyond cost savings.
Building world class telecom and mobility management Centers of Excellence.
Work together to build environments that contribute to overall strategic business results.
Accelerating buyer and seller growth opportunities.
Help each other identify opportunities for growth in their respective businesses.
To take it one step further, if we are going to change the industry, we recommend the buyers / businesses focus on the following:
1. Focus on Inventory / Data Accuracy & Integrity
- If you don’t have an accurate inventory of invoices, contracts, assets, licenses, etc., it negatively impacts so many areas of the business and will keep you from ever reaching peak efficiency or having a Center of Excellence.
- Not integrating changes in your environment into the inventory drives a high level of inefficiency. We can’t even begin to tell you how many environments we see that don’t have a MACD process integrated into their inventory. And they wonder why their inventory is never accurate or why they get garbage reports.
- Where is your source of truth if you don’t have an accurate inventory? Something must be the book of record or source of truth. Where is it in your company? Get one as fast as possible.
- How do you make informed decisions without an accurate set of data? Enough said.
- If you don’t have a 90% confidence rating in your inventory, you are not there yet.
2. Find New Success Factors & Performance Measurements Beyond Cost Savings
- What do the CEO and CIO care about and what measurements show value to their initiatives?
- What does IT group leadership care about and what measurements show value to their initiatives?
- If your success factors and measurements are mostly what the TEM group cares about, you are far from where you need to be.
- Are savings really the best you can do in terms of showing value? Definitely not. Step up your value creation game and show it everywhere you can.
- What are your top 3 to 5 success factors and measurements for each group in your organization?
3. Change the Buying Process
- Get procurement out of the early part of the process. They don’t belong there, and it has a negative impact on the likelihood of long-term vendor / business success. Bring them in at the time when they can best show their value.
- The more time you spend on the front end of the relationship, before contract signing, the greater the chances of success overall. Little time up-front most often translates into little success. This is not the time and place to hurry, hurry, hurry.
- Be upfront and honest with the vendors. Don’t make them jump through so many hoops when you are not prepared to make a decision. Having a vendor answer a 300 question RFP in a short timeline, only to not make or significantly delay a decision is not even professional. You should be embarrassed to even do it.
- You have heard of location, location, and location in real estate. In our industry we need to start with communicate, communicate, and communicate. Don’t go dark on the vendors. Be straight with them, good news or bad. Just be honest, and direct and always set the right expectations. Be transparent.
4. Treat the Vendors as Partners
- Work together with vendors on your greatest challenges.
- Don’t treat the vendors just as vendors. Treat them as your partner. They really can help you solve your greatest challenges.
- Get rid of your standard QBRs as most of us know them. Use a majority of the time as a working session to solve challenges and anticipate needs.
- What happens with your partnership when you hide things or are not fully transparent with your spouse or significant other? Same thing here. It’s common sense and yet we don’t do well practicing it in this industry.
- The strongest relationships with vendors begin with you looking in the mirror first and identifying your own internal challenges. Then be open and transparent. You will be surprised what that change will make.
5. Expand Focus on the Value Provided to the Entire Organization (Beyond the TEM Group)
- Forget the TEM group. They should be your last priority.
- Like we stated in #2 above, what does the C-Suite care about? Your entire team should know the five most important initiatives to the CEO, the CIO, Finance, Operations, and the revenue generating leader.
- Go through an exercise with your team where you map the contributions you can make to the top five initiatives of each group. You will be surprised with what your team comes up with.
- Create a format and plan to show your value to those groups on a monthly or certainly a quarterly basis.
- Get rid of all your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports if people don’t read them or don’t take action based on them. You will find half of your reports can be eliminated and replaced with proactive reports that have meaning to the readers.
Background
AOTMP University delivers online training and certifications to the Telecom, Mobility, and Cloud / IT management industry.
After 20 years in business, w know what works and what doesn’t. We see the great relationships. We see the churn. We hear about the great buyers and the unreasonable buyers. We hear about the effective and the ineffective vendors. We see the buyers who will never have a successful TEM program until they change internally. We see the sellers who will say anything and go beyond reasonable ethics to get a deal. We hear the vendors who say they have never lost a customer, yet we can easily dispute it. We see the enterprise buyers who put 100% of the blame on their vendor, yet the greatest challenge is within their own organization. We see the many happy relationships and we see the many relationships that just exist because it’s too painful to change. And we see the investor wins along with huge investor losses in the tens of millions. We see it all.
Armed with this experience, we have decided to author this eight-part series, not to just point out all the challenges, but to bring awareness to all the growth opportunities right in front of us if we can work together to affect change. It must start, and it starts with one vendor and one buyer, then two vendors and two buyers and builds from there.
