One of the largest expenses for private equity firms can be their telecom invoices, but there are easy ways for PE firms to save. Follow these tips and start saving on your telecom expenses today.
Leverage Your Portfolio For Better Rates
You need to be increasingly innovative in leveraging the combined spend of your portfolio of companies to insure you receive the best in class price points for your sized company.
Look for a partner that is passionate about taking on the challenges and issues that are important. Every private-equity firm is different. Some PE firms have portfolio companies that are opening new locations, entering new markets and increasing their staffs, while other are aggressively consolidating operations. Either way, THE GOAL IS TO ADD VALUE TO YOUR PORTFOLIO.
Product experts know the plays in your vendor’s playbook because they used to play ball on their team. They have developed services and processes to leverage this knowledge and save you money!
Consolidate and Optimize Services
Rates and promotions change often. Carriers constantly “get creative” to drive new revenue and increase sales. Negotiating service optimization without knowledge of the marketplace can cost you serious money.
Pure and Simple, you need to creatively work with your vendors to insure that YOU, are treated fairly and are aligned with the correct telecom vendors that fit your unique business needs in the areas of voice, data, wireless, internet, and equipment.
Should you have all your business with one carrier? Is it smart to select one vendor from each of the various tiers of players? What combination of carriers works best for a portfolio of your size?
You need the ammunition to define the right strategy for you. You need to know what to say, how to say it and who to say it to. A good way to accomplish this is to work with a category specialist.
Stop Paying For Stuff You Don’t Use
We see this all the time. There are thousands of users in multiple locations assigned one or sometimes multiple devices. People leave the company, new hires join the team, and your monthly invoices, often hundreds of pages long, keep coming, month after month after month. How much can you be missing? Don’t just take our word for it; here’s the research!
“Enterprises that are not auditing their telecommunications invoices are forfeiting an extra 10% or more of their network services spending to the network service providers (NSPs).” – Gartner Research
You need to know which fees can be waived or discounted. Understand the confusing terms and conditions is essential. Then you can turn this insight into action.
Good analysts are like surgeons. They identify the problem areas and immediately stop the bleeding. They then determine when the bleeding started and present a detailed summary to the carriers. The result is that you immediately stop paying for stuff you no longer use, while aggressively pursuing a credit for all those months you paid for services that were not being used.
Secure Credits For Previous Billing Errors
Telecommunications companies are the end result of a stream of mergers and acquisitions. Carriers have multiple billing systems and making them “talk to each other” is not an easy or inexpensive task. As a result, 80% of all telecom invoices have errors
Understanding telecom invoices is nearly impossible for most procurement and IT professionals. Identifying and correcting billing errors is a time consuming and frustrating experience.
Not for the experts.
Telecom Analysts confidently navigate this maze of confusing acronyms, hidden charges, and multiple taxes for the simple reason that they know what to look for and where to look for it. Their vast knowledge and expertise comes from years of experience working for Telecommunications companies. You should put our knowledge to work for you
Centralize Procurement
Many companies have a disconnect between procurement and payables. Technology updates occur rapidly. Decentralized procurement and employees with liberal discretion can lead to costly purchases. You need to identify a solution that has all the advantages of centralized purchasing, while maintaining autonomy for multiple locations.
The best way to solicit responses from potential vendors and to select the best match is by conducting an RFP asking the vendors to look at the PE firm as a single client, thus improving the buying power of all the portfolio companies.
[author_bio username=”Ken” name=”yes”]
