One of my areas of focus this year has been on the SIP trunking and the related business opportunity for convergence resellers. As a former business telephone system and services salesman ('84 -'93) I really like the relative simplicity of selling the SIP trunking concept because it mirrors some of the straightforward ‘pencil-sell' products and services that delivered hard dollar bottom line savings back then.

At the time, many small and mid-sized companies were still renting Western Electric telephone systems from AT&T or the local ‘baby bells' on a month to month basis. Some of the gear we would come across was 20 years old or more, and yet every month that big rental bill would keep coming. It was almost like shooting fish in a barrel to cannibalize the Western Electric base with the latest electronic telephone systems (I repped for a North Jersey company that carried Toshiba Business Telephone Systems). Generally you could quote a monthly lease on a new system with infinitely more modern features (speakerphones, speed dials, conference - wow!) for less money than they were already paying for their rental system. As a twenty something single salesman, it was party time. (I bet it was almost as good as selling sub-prime no-doc mortgages a couple years ago, but I digress). If you can show a bottom line hard dollar savings to a business owner, and give them something better in the process, you've got a winner. Let loose the hounds.

Likewise, I had friends that worked in sales for MCI and Sprint, and they too had an easy pencil sell opportunity to cannibalize the AT&T long distance business market (post divestiture) with cheaper rates - bottom line savings every month. And here's where the parallel to SIP trunking comes in. Prior to long distance equal access capability in the network, the competitive carriers would switch you to their service by  installing physical dialers, special gear installed at the customer site that would sit between the premise based phone system and the central office lines, capture outbound dialed numbers, analyze and re-dial it. If it recognized a long distance phone number, it would prefix the re-dial with an access code to route the call onto Sprint or MCI's network. So without modifying or changing any of the customer's telephone system gear or user behavior, they could capture the long distance traffic.

Fast forward to today, and you will find the same type of opportunity exists with SIP trunking. This month our IT department brought in a few competitive carrier SIP trunks to test with one of our gateways in front of our current (non-SIP ready) PBX. Since the domestic long distance cost is up to 75% less (!!) than what we currently pay for our PSTN service from one of today's tier one carriers, the hard dollar savings can pay for a gateway in no time, depending on your call volume of course. The gateway is a lot like those dialers MCI and Sprint used to install in the 80's requiring little or no impact to users and the existing infrastructure. And like the fancy electronic telephone systems I used to peddle, the add-on features to the SIP trunking services are pretty cool and useful. In today's economy, I think the hard dollar savings and this type of pencil sell will have a strong appeal to businesses all over. I smell blood. Seems like a good time for savvy SIP trunking providers and resellers to let loose a bunch of fine young sales cannibals on this business opportunity.