Helping Connectivity Wholesale Sellers Expand Their Reach
In our brand new guide, “5 Pillars of Wholesale Connectivity Selling in 2022”, our first pillar focused on the importance of understanding your total addressable market. In this blog, we’ll look at that point in greater detail, helping you understand its true value and giving you the steps to get started today.
Here are the two main components of creating an understanding of your total addressable market, which we will cover today:
- Clean up your existing building lists to understand your serviceable locations
- Conducting a near-net analysis to identify options for expansion
With these two steps accomplished, you’ll understand the full scale of your OnNet or lit building opportunities, and the immediate nearby opportunities you have in the market
To put us on even footing before we jump right in, let’s first define a few items.
KMZ Files: A KMZ file is a Zip-compressed KML file that stores map locations viewable in various geographic information systems (GIS) applications, most notably Google Earth. (Via fileinfo.com)
OnNet Buildings: OnNet buildings are properties where network service providers have physically built connectivity with network that they own.
NearNet Buildings: NearNet buildings are locations that are just a short build away from where you already service.
NearNet Analysis: A service offering that provides a distance-based assessment of buildings in close proximity to a network service provider’s existing routes.
With these few definitions addressed, let’s dive into the details.
Clean Up Your Existing Building Lists
If you’re reading this, then it’s safe to assume that you are familiar with KMZ files and the rest of the terminology we discussed in the previous section. But our goal today is to dive deeper and understand how they work and how to take the next step.
The high-level theme behind this post will be the importance of digitally transforming the way you do business. Operating with KMZ files is an overly manual process that makes it harder than needed to fully visualize your full serviceability and even harder to communicate it to your partners and prospects.
Turning KMZ files into on-net building lists makes it easier for you to view, update and manage, sort, and distribute your serviceability.
Being able to manage data, like your serviceable locations, update information, add new data, remove data, and being able to share this data with buyers are all important tasks.
This means having clean, accurate, and organized building lists will be more than necessary for your sales team. If your data isn’t clean, is fragmented, or just hard to sift through, it’s costing your business money. Here’s an example of the real-world cost of bad data.
“In the US alone, poor data quality costs the economy up to $3.1 trillion yearly.” – Techjury.net
While this statistic isn’t specific to the connectivity industry, it still illustrates the point about the cost of poor data management. Being able to understand and quickly communicate your serviceability is a necessity for you to be able to scale your revenue in 2022 and beyond.
The Connected World Platform has become an essential tool for many wholesalers when it comes to cleaning up and managing their building lists. For OPTK Networks, they got tremendous value out of this more efficient and accurate process.
After joining The Connected World Platform they saw their lead time to identify serviceable locations drastically reduced from months to minutes.
What this boils down to is improving accuracy in your data and speed to retrieve and share it to help your organization grow. The fact of the matter is that when sellers move too slowly they lose out on deals. If they provide inaccurate information for a deal or inversely they miss out on an opportunity because partners don’t know that they service a location, that hinders growth. The buyers’ experience needs to be smooth and frictionless or your business will suffer.
Organization and data cleanliness on your end enable you to move to action quickly and thus respond to more RFPs.
Run a NearNet Analysis
To this point, we’ve focused on the importance of understanding your OnNet footprint. We’ve talked about how both of these enable you to move quickly and accurately to respond to requests from prospects and how this will help you grow your market presence.
But, as we mentioned in the beginning, there is another large part of understanding your total addressable market and that is running a NearNet analysis. This analysis identifies nearby opportunities where you can sell to and grow your OnNet footprint.
This process will allow you to strategically choose where to build that will provide you with the best ROI which will allow you to scale your operation with a plan. In the simplest terms possible, a NearNet analysis will show you the best and closest opportunities for you to grow and sell to.
That growth is not just capped here though. One of the wonderful things about NearNet opportunities is that they grow as you grow your network.
For instance, let’s say you identify a profitable NearNet opportunity so you sell it and build to it, transitioning that building to an OnNet building. The next time you conduct a NearNet analysis, you will have new buildings that are now close to this new OnNet build and propels your opportunity to continually expand your reach. This never-ending opportunity will continue to serve your business with opportunities to expand your serviceability and market presence.
Traditionally, NearNet analyses are executed in two ways, line of sight and right of way. Let’s take a look at both of these.
Using line of sight means looking at a straight line from the network path or access point going out a set number of feet (based on your own capital constraints), be it 500 feet, 1,000 feet, and so on. Some issues that arrive from this method are:
- It lacks insight into the path your network is built on and overstates reach within the capital constraints of most providers.
- It fails to recognize impediments that increase costs and derail builds.
Knowing these impediments before you go to market will allow you to set the correct pricing and timeline expectations and improve the overall buyers’ experience.
The best option for NearNet analysis is to use the right of way method. This is a major improvement on line of sight and highlights the ability to follow the path of how connectivity is actually built versus the line of site method, which we will go over more in the next section. The algorithm used for this approach follows the right of way algorithm just like conceptually what is used for driving directions, but without the one way traveling and other traffic realities. It’s more precise because it more accurately follows the path of how a real-world build actually occurs.
There are several key items to keep aware of that the digital NearNet via right of way method does not capture that Connectbase team can help with including knowing impediments along the build process like railroad crossings, or the specific entrance point for buildings with their utilities.
Even with these opportunities for improvement, understanding your NearNet opportunities is an extremely important initiative for your business one yields a massive return on investment when done correctly. According to Connectbase Labs, on average our customers see their total addressable market double after a NearNet analysis and top-line revenue growth accelerates.
That’s a significant-sized growth for your business.
For connectivity wholesale sellers the question is how do you take advantage of this opportunity but execute it in a better way.
Here are a few points that you need to consider:
- Accuracy
- Deliverability
- Cost Assurance
Let’s take a deeper dive into this.
The Need For Accuracy In A NearNet Analysis
Accuracy is very important when executing a NearNet analysis. We’ve illustrated some of the shortcomings in the methodologies above, but what does that impact look like in the real world?
One example was highlighted in our customer spotlight with Jason Axthelm, VP of Business Development, OPTK Networks. In this webinar, he talks about feeling that their detailed near-net buildings lists were actually less than 50% accurate prior to partnering with Connectbase.
Using other platforms to run a NearNet analysis can be more costly and if they aren’t very accurate that only makes them more expensive.
If you double your total addressable market but can’t trust half of the added locations, then you’ve already taken a big chunk out of the opportunity that you just created. That level of confidence makes it impossible to harness the full potential of your total addressable market and will lead to issues with your partners for these locations.
Expanding your serviceability with accuracy has to be the priority here so your sales team can target NearNet opportunities with confidence.
Issues Arriving In Deliverability To NearNet Opportunities
We noted earlier that when executing a NearNet analysis there are many variables that you have to consider. Servicing each individual location may produce a wide array of impediments and having an understanding of these before you go to market is a competitive advantage.
While something like a one-way road is not an actual impediment to creating a network route, something like a railroad crossing is and can cost issues in your projected build timeline. Thinking back to the customer experience, if they are planning a move and your projected 90-day timeline doubles or worse, that has a major impact on the customer and your business’s reputation.
The Financial Impact Of Inaccurate NearNet Analyses
These inaccuracies and unknown impediments have tangible financial impacts on network providers in their NearNet operations. In a recent survey, over 85% of respondents noted that they are surprised with special construction in 5% or more of their NearNet orders.
On average, there are over 300,000 orders a month and it’s estimated that more than 40% of those come with special construction and important requirements.
If we take that monthly average and extrapolate it over a year, and we assume just that 5% of the time that there are surprise special construction costs, then that means that there are at least 72,000 orders a year that cost more or take longer than originally planned.
When you go to execute on a NearNet order, these repeated overages add up and harshly impact your bottom line. Having an accurate view of your NearNet opportunities that account for impediments allows you to have a realistic plan for your build that doesn’t go over budget or take longer than expected which causes frustration for you and your customers.
A Better Way To Conduct A NearNet Analysis
To this point, we’ve established the value of understanding and expanding your total addressable market with a NearNet analysis. Additionally, we’ve examined the traditional execution methods and the associated issues with these methods.
Assured NearNet from Connectbase was built with solving these issues in mind and with the goal of giving network providers the most accurate view into these opportunities. Here’s what we did.
Leveraging A More Precise Total Addressable Market Today
With an understanding of the shortcomings of calculating NearNet opportunities and knowing its importance at the same time, we set out to solve these issues.
What we developed was Assured NearNet, and here’s how it helps you more accurately calculate these opportunities.
Our algorithm takes access point locations and calculates the Right of Way path and distance for a network build from the access point to the rooftop center point. This calculation takes both the public right of way distance such as the road and the private right of way distance across the parcel, penetrating the building footprint and termination inside of the building.
In short, Assured NearNet uses all relevant information in a build, including cost impediment insights and private property distances, to give you the most detailed and accurate analysis of your NearNet opportunities.
Armed with this information, you are prepared to go to market and expand your market presence with as few surprises as possible.
For more information, get a Demo with Connectbase today.