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TeleBright.com Helps Small Businesses
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By Josh Long
January 2001
Value-added resellers (VARs) who work with small to medium-sized businesses could gain an additional mousetrap to lure customers—TeleBright Corp.
With a revenue-sharing program that targets agents, the Maryland-based TeleBright.com (www.telebright.com), a portal for telecommunications services, befriends VARs and other communications representatives, such as phone installation companies, to promote its business, which compares telecommunications services online.
VARs working in the telephone and networking industry may recommend TeleBright.com's services to find businesses a customized plan from dozens of service providers, says Kristie Hughes, TeleBright.com's vice president of marketing.
The company features local and long- distance services, T1 lines, DSL, web hosting, wireless and Internet dial-up.
"People are able to offer even greater end-to-end solutions for their customers," Hughes says of the agent program. "It does not stop with the phone system. Customers want to be able to have one-stop shopping."
TeleBright.com CEO Chet Thaker spent a decade at the helm of IntelliSales Corp. (www.intellisales.com)--a company that developed support systems to enable customers to find a viable telecommunications plan--before he founded TeleBright.com in November 1999.
The telecom veteran noticed that larger service providers were not focused on attracting plans that met the needs of small to medium-sized businesses, Hughes says. "TeleBright.com was born out of that idea."
By 2004, the online sales of telecommunications products and services could reach $47 billion, according to the Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com).
Despite the shake-up of the dot coms, Hughes says securing multiple distribution channels in a niche targeting small to medium-sized businesses will secure a future for the company.
Hughes insists TeleBright.com's agent program is an important channel offline, in additional to the company's co-branding and private-label partnerships online.
The agreements enable partners to use TeleBright.com's back office to provide businesses with a means to compare and shop for telecom services. The partners may either feature a website that promotes their own image in a private-label agreement, or enter a co-branding deal, in which both company logos are displayed.
In September, TeleBright.com signed an agreement with NBC Internet Inc.'s AllBusiness.com (www.allbusiness.com), a virtual business partner that provides small and growing businesses solutions such as start-up kits, financing services and free business directory listings.
TeleBright.com executives said the agreement marked "the first strategic alliance between a major small-business portal and an outsourcer of telecom comparison-shopping technology."
Hughes says a key to boosting Internet transactions will hinge, in part, on developing relationships with companies that bundle services and also partner with organizations that aggregate resources and retain a large customer base.
Typically, whether shoppers have accessed the TeleBright.com service directly or through a partner, customers reviewing the telecom services have visited a new portal and entered their personal information in order to buy voice and data services.
But the customer experience and the ways businesses promote online products and services are evolving.
TeleBright.com partners and member organizations with whom they have aligned can use the information the company provides as a more integrated application, Hughes explains.
By consolidating the information, partners may increase a customer's comfort level, and ultimately, the likelihood of a purchase.
"The integration is so tight, the customer feels like they are never leaving," Hughes says.
Hughes says TeleBright.com is moving toward this model, where the company will function as an ASP.
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