The wireless business, at the tender age of twenty-something, barely old enough to drink, has grown from very modest beginnings to a dominant global industry in no time flat. In this short 20 years, wireless has permeated the US population, from pre-teens to post-retirees while transcending all economic barriers with a barrage of affordable service cost options. Now subscribers have nearly a zero barrier to entry with free handsets available to all that provide roaming-free service coverage among major carriers that blankets the geographical US with quality we could only dream of a few short years ago.
In short, it's cheap, ubiquitous, has universal appeal and has moved successfully to a main stream audience and mass market retailers. With feature and content-rich mobile media, data, gaming, productivity, networking and the adoption of wireless as a land line alternative, the business is poised for yet another enormous growth cycle. This new chapter, which will allow unprecedented interaction of voice, pictures, data and synchronization with other devices is being positioned as yet another strong push toward mass-market distribution. A shift that has already had a significant negative affect on the traditional wireless merchant. Eroding margins, greater churn and lightening-fast handset cycles have blended to pose very real threats to all but the largest niche players. Many have diversified, some have consolidated to gain greater numbers and economies or scale and many have just gone away.
The point, not to paint a picture dominated by gloom and doom, is that there is significant, untapped opportunity within the current environment - and even more embedded in the changes ahead, to capitalize upon the very real profit to be extracted from these fundamental shifts. In this fast-paced environment a successful business must employ and align with the current distribution patterns and technology while utilizing outsourcing services to augment and leverage for significantly grow without adding pricey head count or costly capital expenditures.
Resources that allow any dealer, regardless of size, to sell on the Internet, take orders 24/7 with in and outbound 800 telemarketing, leverage carrier coop fund programs ten-fold, efficiently data mine the latent wealth of its existing subscriber base, effectively extract value from existing relationships with partners and customers alike to tap hidden profits that are easily within reach for the taking.
