Tele-Nation Project Aspires to Cultivate Telecom Industry Revival

There's no shortage of creativity or innovation within the telecom sector, but perhaps a lack of alternative leadership perspectives reaching the traditional media. A new research project intends to explore front-line practitioner lessons learned, and their resulting applied wisdom.

Austin, Texas -- February 24, 2003 -- The Tele-Nation, a non-profit telecom business community of practice, today announced plans for its first online project -- a unique and engaging telecommunications business-oriented weblog.

The global telecommunications sector is currently going through one of the toughest times in its history. However, with all the turmoil and considerable evidence that this is no time for business-as-usual thinking, substantive ingenuity (specifically to further new telecom service sales and marketing ideas) appears to be at an all time low.

This shortfall of inventiveness is disconcerting, given the fact that creativity is surely a key antidote that will awaken some communication service providers from their near comatose state. Moreover, highlighted by the findings from an ongoing market study, several common key indicators have emerged that may explain the apparent depression.

Telecom business leaders still myopically equate innovation with new infrastructure technology deployment, or discovery of the next elusive killer-application." Most leaders are either too far removed from the front-line realities of their business, or are totally irreverent to the fact that their customer procurement experience is both grievous and devoid of any differentiated value.

Transforming obsolete operational processes and removing dysfunctional sales and support practices from the forefront of the business is often lacking an advocate. Ironically, its also an untapped opportunity to introduce some meaningful and compelling service value back into the exhausted professional account management ranks.

According to David H. Deans, senior partner of Deans & Associates and founder of the Tele-Nation project, sales teams that merely communicate product feature benefits are clearly missing the mark. Salespeople must now proactively create their own customer value in order to survive and prosper." Deans adds, the challenge for carriers is to establish and nurture a credible learning environment where all account managers can develop their consultative selling skills."

A lack of empirical research thats written by industry thought-leaders has hampered service providers ability to evolve their front-line human capital development. Nevertheless, the Whats Next column entitled A Hard Sell Made Easy" in the February 24 issue of Telephony magazine is but one instance of the growing interest in opening a probing dialogue on this subject.

Clearly, most customer telecom and finance managers continue to seek ways to cut their corporate communications costs, but only because no carrier has provided something more compelling than a cost-centric perspective. Regardless, the advent of the Tele-Nation project has the potential of spawning a collaborative online community where progressive ideas will fuel a refreshing debate that could contribute to a much needed telecom renaissance.

For Additional Information, Please Contact:
David H. Deans
Executive Director
Tele-Nation
http://telenation.mainpage.net/
USA Phone: 443-247-2594
UK Phone: 07092 37 5455

Source: Deans & Associates