When Joe Oesterling joined Cbeyond in 2000, he had a technologists’ dream – a green field implementation combined with the time, funding, and people to build a best in class IT environment.  A decade later the focus has shifted to supporting new services while renovating some of the applications and infrastructure that have been deployed five to ten years ago. 

While Cbeyond has grown rapidly in 10 years from a startup to more than $400 million in revenue in 2009, their need for technology innovation has never stopped.  When asked about upcoming projects, Oesterling said “We are putting more technology in the hands of our sales people.”

In each market, Cbeyond employs about 70 people of which 50-60 are direct sales reps.  Sales reps are the ones who make personal contact and present solution alternatives to small business owners. Enabling effectiveness at the point of contact for sales simply means Cbeyond, as a technology service provider, needs to put more technology in the hands of their sales teams.

“We’ve previously rolled out a sales force automation solution including basic capabilities on the Blackberry, but now we will bump it up a notch. The price point for business class netbooks is moving within range, and we can empower the sales person with information and demos of our services and extend our full sales force automation solution to drive more sales effectiveness and efficiency,” observed Oesterling.

“Our sales professionals will be demonstrating technology which small businesses can use to level the playing field with larger competitors.  A small law firm in the suburbs can now compete with a large firm in the city. There are many new innovations coming into the market which will be good for Cbeyond and great for our customers,” said Oesterling in a voice which reflected the fun he truly seems to be having these days.

The bottom line message here is that if you are hooked in with innovative mobile applications like sales force automation, rest assured that there is rising interest and demand for them.

By Mike Adkinson

March 2010