This just in -- Cold calling is not dead. Good news? Bad news? Sales guru Ken Murray thinks there are five reasons why this is good news.
"More companies than ever have increased their efforts with good old fashioned cold calling," Murray says, adding that "the challenging economy has pushed companies to reduce their more costly outside sales efforts and replace them with cold calling... I know, it is not sexy, does not get much buzz, and you can't really brag about it at a business gathering, but prospecting by phone does get results."
Why? His five reasons, which center around prospecting software:
Prospecting Software remains relevant today because driving the productivity of Inside Sales teams is what keeps many companies in business and profitable. They simply can't experiment and hope that something new in social media has the answers. They have to make the calls, connect and sell.
Satellite communications offer several advantages over terrestrial data connections such as DSL or Frame Relay - such as flexibility, network topology and the benefit of 24x7 global coverage.
But these benefits can be costly in regards to latency performance.
According to a recent study from EndIIEnd titled ""TCP/IP over Satellite: Optimization vs. Acceleration," the large latency associated with satellite communications "originates in the 125 ms required for data packets to travel at the speed of light from the earth's surface to any one of the communication satellites positioned over the equator. This implies a minimum round trip time (up and down and back again) between the source and destination of a data session of at least 500 ms."
And this is a problem, since neither client-server applications nor the TCP protocol are designed to accommodate these high latencies, as the study says. "Most applications are written without regard for network latency, as though the client and the server are connected over a high speed Local Area Network. The TCP protocol was designed for use on terrestrial networks where latencies seldom exceed 250 ms to travel around the world over copper or fiber circuits."
The satellite industry has developed a number of technologies to minimize the effects of latency on TCP satellite communications, outlined in the study, which are most often termed "TCP Acceleration."
IntercontinentalExchange operates regulated exchanges, trading platforms and clearing houses serving the global markets for agricultural, credit, currency, emissions, energy and equity index markets.
According to Gigamon officials, the firm deployed multiple 10Gbps and 1Gbps TAPs throughout their network infrastructure on external links, but "did not have a comprehensive, centralized, and cost-effective way to access and monitor secure mission- critical traffic."
So after searching for suitable tools, the company decided to deploy the GigaVUE-2404 Data Access Switch from Gigamon.
According to Gigamon officials, the network team "consolidated the management of multiple 10Gbps and 1Gbps TAPs. Mapping input and output filters based on IP address range corresponding to the server switches were used to divide traffic into different logical groupings so that each monitoring tool was responsible for monitoring traffic belonging to one or several specific business functions."