ISPCON: Wireless Marketing and Sales Tactics

Forbes Mercy's advice on selling against wireline? Don't! But if you have to, take no prisoners.

by Jeff Goldman [November 28, 2006]

Forbes Mercy, president of the wireless ISP Washington Broadband and its sister company Northwest Infonet, started his ISPCON session (Marketing and Sales Tactics for Wireless Services, Selling Against Wireline) by stressing the importance of seeking out locations where you're not forced to sell against wireline services.

Washington Broadband is headquartered in Yakima, Washington, with a population of 80,000 and significant competition from both wired and wireless providers. "We have three wireless Internet providers, we've got Charter Cable, and we have the Qwest telephone company," Mercy said. "The competition from Charter and Qwest, as you know, is fairly vicious."

In comparison, the nearby town of Naches, Washington, 15 miles from Yakima, has a population of 653 people, and no high speed internet access. 75 percent of them get dialup from Northwest Infonet. "When you look at that, you say, 'wow, why is nobody here?'" Mercy said.

Owning the town
One AP on the ridge overlooking Naches, Mercy said, can support a small mesh network in town—and the town is covered. "The reason I'm doing mesh is that they don't have a cable company, there are no CLECs, and so I can do VoIP down there," he said. "I figure that with 653, if I don't get 250 people out of that, I'm not doing my job."

To achieve those numbers, Mercy has an extremely simple plan. "I'll hire high school students from Naches High School to go door to door, signing people up for high speed internet and for phone service. I kick the kids a commission, and I've got door-to-door service for the entire community—and I own the town," he said.

Mercy also buys $69 yard signs which simply say that high speed internet access is available in the area, along with basic contact information, and places them on the county rights of way. "I get more calls from those signs than all my radio advertising, which I spend $2,000 a month on," he said. "Signs are very, very effective, especially in the rural areas where you're the exclusive guy. Sure, they'll get knocked down, the kids'll take them from time to time, but who cares? They're 69 bucks."

Customers in places like Naches, Mercy said, are both loyal and appreciative. "When you have an outage, the customer doesn't call screaming," he said. "They just shrug their shoulders and say, 'We're lucky to even have high speed.' It's like the joke about voice over IP: 'Thank God we had cellular, so people were used to bad phone service!'"

Another strong argument for deploying in a small town like Naches, Mercy said, is the low noise level. "In a city, the hospitals are using 2.4 GHz between their doctors' offices, you've got Pepsi running 2.4 between their trucks—a spectrum analyzer in downtown Yakima is off the charts," he said. "Not out in Naches: it's almost non-existent. So I have less interference and better opportunities."

And Mercy said finding land to place a tower on is rarely an issue. "I buy these little chunks of land on top of desolate mountains: I pay $8,000 for five acres of desert out in the middle of nowhere," he said. "Then I get a 40-foot wood telephone pole and get the electrical company to put it in, and I've got service to that whole area."

Selling against wireline
Still, Mercy does offer service in downtown Yakima as well. "I'd be stupid not to," he said. "Because the side benefit of going into a town like Naches is that their employees work in Yakima, so when they're getting internet for their companies, they're thinking, 'Why not just use Washington Broadband for everything?' So of course I put a network in downtown."

To stop the city of Yakima from bringing in an outside company to install a municipal Wi-Fi network, Mercy keeps city officials up to date on every bad experience that wireless cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco have. "Part of your communications and your marketing is telling these guys, 'Look how terrible it would be if you did it; look at all the horrible things these other guys are going through,'" he said.

At the same time, Mercy said, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. "If they insist on it, insist that they spend it with you. Get a community block grant to pay for the money to put a mesh network in their downtown area, and it'll look like you're riding the wave of the future," he said.

A key focus of marketing, Mercy said, is making sure your competition doesn't get a foot in the door. When Clearwire came to Yakima, Washington Broadband was quick to point out that Clearwire didn't support Vonage over its network. "When you tell them that, when you say, 'They're restricting your free choices,' it scares the heck out of the city," he said.

"Always go after your competition viciously when they're the big guys, and show what you can do," Mercy said. "Because you're the veterans, you've already got their ear. If you let the other guys take it away, it's your own fault."

And that's even true for dialup. "I go after Charter [with ads] saying, 'Are you up to 70 bucks a month when all you wanted to do was check your e-mail? Maybe dialup wasn't that bad after all—try our new accelerated dialup,'" Mercy said. "And they come back."

—End