Advantage: The “One Stop” Solution For Business Technology

As we discussed in an earlier post, the service provider direct sales model no longer meets the needs of today’s business customer.  But Advantage’s ‘sourcing advisor’ approach does.

Advantage’s unique model addresses the needs of today’s businesses, and their IT teams. We consolidate all the key areas of IT into a single support model while giving customers the flexibility to choose ANY provider required for their business. Advantage offers solution engineering, project management, vendor support, and numerous other services just like the providers. The major difference is that Advantage has placed all 150+ of those vendors under a single roof, with one single point of contact. So, despite today’s chaotic multi-provider competitive landscape, Advantage can offer a comprehensive 'single company' solution.

Over the past 15 years, Advantage has invested time and capital in people, processes, and a web-based management portal to address the exact the needs of business clients. We are not a traditional telecom agent; rather we’re a full-service technology solution sourcing advisor for business customers worldwide and, in a way, directly competing against the traditional service provider direct sales forces.

Here are the key advantages of dealing with Advantage:

-    We’ll find the right solution for your business needs: When technology becomes outdated, inefficient and/or too costly, IT teams spend inordinate amounts of time researching different offerings, contacting and meeting with potential providers, soliciting bids and evaluating proposals. Advantage manages this entire sales process for our clients, and takes the heavy lifting off the IT team’s shoulders. We’ll meet with the team, uncover current and future needs, design a solution, or solutions – that best address those needs, and then we’ll request proposals from appropriate providers from our 150+ provider portfolio.  Our team will then evaluate all the proposals, and narrow the list down to 2 or three that offer the best benefits to your company. We then review these with your IT team and let them make the decision.

-    We’ll find you the optimal price for your solution: By soliciting bids from dozens of vendors, we’ll ensure that you have a wide range of solutions and price plans to choose from. Our risk-free, results-oriented methodology typically generates 20% - 40% average savings on monthly telecom expenses, with no upfront costs and little or no service downtime

-    We are a single point of contact for service and support: Vendor management in a multi-carrier environment is complex. Our in-house project management team proactively coordinates the installation and turn-up of all new services with the underlying providers, so your team can focus on more strategic initiatives. Our experienced support team handles all day-to-day service issues, and can assist with technical, financial, pricing, project management, contract negotiation and road map planning support as needed. So that exhaustively long list of rep, engineer, and repair phone numbers from each of your providers can move from your desk top to your bottom drawer

-    We are Service Provider Agnostic: We are completely vendor-neutral during the provider and solution selection process. We are not driven by quotas, sales incentives or past relationships. Our loyalty is 100% with our clients.

-    Our team is well-trained: Reps at individual providers are trained to sell and support their own products and services, not competing services or technologies. The Advantage team is trained by all the providers that we represent on both technologies and services. That’s a lot of training, but it makes our team a valuable resource for our clients, so it’s worth it. Our team serves as an extension of your team.

-    Consolidated Online Management: All Advantage customers get access to Liaison, a proprietary web portal that offers 'single pane of glass' of all services across all providers. Clients can securely access information on their entire inventory, contracts, service orders, and even trouble ticketing. There is nobody in the industry that we know of who offers this level of comprehensive detail and support to customers.

-    Assistance with Hardware/Equipment: Ther end-to-end business cases that we construct for clients typically included secondary and tertiary CPE and/or software vendors. The direct reps at your providers are not permitted or don’t always have the technical resources design complete solutions. But the Advantage team ensures that a project is completely covered prior to submitting a business case for review.