Workshop

Pre-Conference Workshop: Telecom Agency 101 - Best Practices for New Telecom Agents
Whether you're considering becoming an agent, just getting started, or looking for best practices advice, this workshop is for you. It will address the basics, such as how to choose suppliers, the ins and outs of contract negotiations, how to process orders and more. Tutorial presentations will be followed by a Q&A panel featuring successful telecom agents.

Beginner’s Basics
Before you can hit the ground running, there are a slew of decisions to be made and processes to be set in place. Whether it’s choosing a lawyer, learning about accounting software, building a brand, designing a Web site or even just securing office space, when the basics are done right, the chances of success multiply. This session will cover the key things you need to know to get started.

Speaker: Greg Howard, Founder, US Telecom Group

Choosing Suppliers
When it comes to choosing suppliers, the catalog of vendors can be quite overwhelming. An agent must choose his or her channel partners with care in order to ensure success down the road. This session will help you uncover ways to size up the various market players and decide whether to work with a carrier, a reseller or a master agent, and the pros and cons of each type of relationship.

Speaker: Dan Vidal, Managing Director, Telecom Advisors

Agent Agreements
After carefully selecting the providers you will represent comes the tedious, yet singularly important, task of negotiating contracts. It is imperative that an agent have a firm grasp on the fine print. Are there evergreen clauses? How are renewals handled? What happens to commissions in the event of contract termination? This session will cover the finer points of negotiating agent agreements.

Speaker: Greg Taylor, Attorney, Technology Law Group LLC.                        

Filling the Funnel
Understanding and knowing how to explain the agent value proposition is a skill that every agent must perfect in order to land customers. And once you have your pitch perfected, how do you go out and build your book of business? This session will touch on the basics of lead-generation and prospecting, in order to help you keep your sales funnel full right from the start.

Speaker: David Goodwin, Principle & Co-founder, ATC 

Getting Paid
Ultimately, agents are in the business for “pay day,” but there are many possible compensation models in the marketplace that can impact your cash flow, especially when starting out. In addition, managing the money that comes in can be a time-consuming task. Typically, there are multiple revenue streams coming from multiple sources that all need to be reconciled into one auditable system.  This session will help you better understand how to get paid and how to track commissions.

Speaker: Bill Power, CEO, Agent Alliance

Colleague Q&A
After a morning of tutorial sessions, please join us for a Q&A where you can ask fellow agents about their humble beginnings and best practices of today. Whether you seek clarification from one of the tutorials or are interested in another aspect of the business, bring your questions and issues to this panel of experts for some advice.

Moderator: Khali Henderson, Editor, PHONE+