How Carriers Try to Increase Your Spend in Tough Times

No Jitter (www.nojitter.com)
Hank Levine

You are part of a business that exists to make money. And if you are in telecom or IT or sourcing, you’re basically viewed as a cost center, not a profit center. When the economy takes a turn for the worse, your job is to help the company save money to improve its bottom line, even as the revenue side of the house works on getting more from customers.

But the carriers are also businesses that exist to make money. When the economy takes a turn for the worse, they work on getting more from their customers. That would be you. So while everyone loves to talk about alignment of interests and “strategic partnerships,” the simple fact is that when the economy is hurting, you need to save money by paying less to vendors runs smack into your telecom suppliers’ need to get more money from … you.

The core of our practice is representing large users in telecom and IT transactions. Over the years, my sense is that suppliers seem to have more insight into the strategies employed by customers to save money than the customers have into the tools used by the carriers to extract more money. The purpose of this article is to level the playing field.

The carriers have a lot in their playbooks. Here are eight strategies that seem to be among their favorites:

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