Telcentris Names Wholesale Sales VP, Teams with WTG
Mark Peterson, who formally led sales and marketing efforts at CLEC CommPartners, will fill the new role. As vice president of wholesale sales, Peterson will oversee white label operations as well as wholesale SMS solutions and carrier services.
Peterson said he’s seen “surprising and dramatic” growth in the area of hosted white label services, which he expects will continue over the next few years and beyond. Telcentris’ VoxOx in Business platform makes the company particularly well-positioned to take advantage of opportunities in the market, he said.
Since its debut last December, Telcentris’ white label hosted sales program has seen tremendous growth even without proactive sales or marketing efforts. Already the program accounts for around 35 percent of new revenue over the last four months, according to vice president of business sales, Tad Nikolich. With the addition of Peterson, Telcentris will begin to more aggressively pursue its wholesale sales strategy.
“The white label program is a huge chunk of new revenue that's being brought into the company,” said Nikolich. “It's a growing and great opportunity for us to increase our sales and revenue.”
With a minimum upfront investment starting at $5,000, Telcentris’ white label partners get access to its turnkey hosted VoIP platform with a breadth of enterprise-level features and support. Telcentris white label program offers three tiers, allowing a range of partners to take advantage -- from a small phone vender or IT shop to a large ILEC or CLEC.
DataMax Wireless, based in Kingman, AZ, began selling Telcentris white label VoIP services in April of 2011. DataMax COO Paul Fleming said demand for VoIP has become so high that some customers are unwilling to buy internet without a voice package. He expects DataMax will easily double its VoIP customers within three to six months.
“We do white label because our customers are much more comfortable having one person to call, one responsible party. When they have any issues at all they just call one company, they don’t have to deal with multiples companies or bills,” said DataMax COO Paul Fleming. “It makes us a sticky provider. If you offer both phone and internet, it makes customers less likely to ever want to switch to anyone else.”
And Telcentris is also sweetening the pot for other channel partners, signing on earlier this month with master agent World Telegom Group. With an arsenal of around 2,000 sub-agents, partners who sell Telcentris’ hosted PBX, SIP trunking, or Hosted Contact Center products can earn margins of 23 percent. That’s three percent higher than what Telcentris offers through direct sales.
"We are excited about the new Telcentris niche opportunity in the hosted call center space. Telcentris is a hands-on organization and we look forward to working with them and our future prospects," said Vince Bradley, World Telecom Group’s CEO.
With Peterson as its new VP of wholesale sales and the WTG partnership, Telcentris is focusing its efforts more deliberately on the channel, according to Nikolich.
“Within the past year we've grown quite tremendously. About 10 to 12 months ago, 50 percent of our sales came through direct sales, and 50 percent from the channel,” he said. “We've made some changes internally to really focus on the channel, and now month-to-month, over 85 percent of our new business comes through the channel, and only 15 percent through direct sales.”