How to Reach Potential Fiber Customers

Speedy fiber connections can be beneficial to just about any type of business, so whom should you, the partner, target first for fiber sales?

This one-stop slide show offers answers to that question and supplies you with talking points for client conversations.

Looking for more? Go here to download our in-depth report, “5 Business Needs Where Fiber Is a Must-Have.”

**Source material by Kevin Casey**

Follow executive editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

You’re used to seeing the commercials for gigabit fiber to the home, but cablecos such as Comcast are offering even faster speeds to businesses via this technology.

“One of the key advantages of fiber circuits is the ability to scale based on network demand,” Evan M. Gilman, founder and principal at Transit Brokers and vice president of the Technology Channel Association, told us.

Many businesses today are running complex, data-intensive applications such as SaaS, disaster recovery and more, meaning they’re using more bandwidth. Fiber can answer the call.

So who needs to scale bandwidth? Anyone with a business-continuity/disaster-recovery strategy — which should be most businesses, particularly those with a lot to lose if disaster strikes.

“A backup is only useful if it’s complete and it’s not corrupted,” Michael Bremmer, CEO of Telecomquotes.com, told us. “The only way to get that is to have good upload speeds.”

And it’s becoming commonplace to expect a data center will have a scalable fiber connection to support a BC/DR strategy.

Health-care businesses have many reasons to buy fiber from you. Their technology is rapidly evolving, and the technology they use today is very demanding in terms of bandwidth.

Examples include telemedicine (more patients are demanding to see their doctors via video chat), imaging (hospitals need to be able to transmit images reliably and quickly) and electronic health records (its value is tied to easy accessibility).

Back to a breakdown of more businesses in a moment.

First, this slide and the next show the perceptions that partners have of cable companies as primary vs. secondary providers in a variety of tech categories.

Any business that frequently uses video conferencing and collaboration tools would benefit from a fiber deployment.

We all know that video tends to be a bandwidth hog. And you certainly don’t want to pay for an expensive conferencing system that doesn’t work effectively due to poor bandwidth.

Large organizations that collaborate with partners and customers in multiple locations, or those that send tons of files back and forth, will like fiber to keep that process running smoothly.

Contact centers are a good fit for fiber because they often require uncompressed, hosted voice at a 1-to-1 ratio for simultaneous calls.

Customer call centers that increasingly receive hosted voice and VoIP calls need that bandwidth.

The bandwidth needs at any business will grow as they take on more and more cloud apps. In particular, when multiple employees are using multiple services at one time – and they’re expected to be on 24/7 – you’ll need bandwidth.

Relatively speaking, fiber is inexpensive, especially considering the loss in productivity a business will endure if its employees aren’t operating at optimal speeds.

“Channels have to demonstrate the ROI associated with fiber: high productivity, high reliability and long-term costs savings,” Anurag Agrawal, Techaisle analyst, told us.

You’ve heard it before, but talking up business outcomes is the best way to make the sale. Convince customers that the extra change they’ll spend on fiber is worth it in the long run. A solid connection will make everything else run as it should.