Frontier said that it should be winning over more medium-sized business customers in the markets it currently serves.
The service provider took efforts to enhance the focus on business services by creating separate commercial and consumer business units.
In the third quarter of 2016, Frontier realigned sales, marketing and commercial product management under a single leader as part of a company reorganization process. Ultimately, Ken Arndt was tapped to head up the centralized Commercial Sales team.
Perley McBride, CFO of Frontier, told investors during the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media And Telecom Conference 2017 that it can leverage that its well-established footprint of on-net fiber fed buildings to win more customers.
RELATED: Frontier’s Arndt: We’ve become more like a CLEC in our business markets
“Ken Arndt is a firm believer that we should not be losing any bids in the middle tier business space,” McBride said. “There should not be anyone that can compete with us in the middle tier space.”
CTF small, medium business opportunities
Now that the integration of Verizon’s wireline properties in the California, Texas and Florida (CTF) properties are behind them, Frontier is going to make an effort to win market share with small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) in the region.
A number of businesses have churned over to cable and CLEC competitors in the CTF markets because when Verizon owned the properties, it mainly focused on large enterprise customers.
“On the CTF side of the business, we see the small and medium-sized businesses being a great opportunity,” McBride said. “We think they were underserved by Verizon, which spent most of their time on the enterprise side.”
The service provider plans to market its suite of data services like Ethernet, cloud and voice services to what it says is a growing market opportunity in the CTF markets.
“At the end of the first quarter, our sales funnel was 75% full, but we want to get that up to 100%,” McBride said. “We’ll keep seeing improvements in that and keep seeing a more productive sales force on the commercial side.”
Leveraging on-net fiber footprint
One of the key assets making Frontier confident that it can win over more medium and large businesses is its on-net fiber footprint.
To date, Frontier has over 30,000 buildings in its network footprint connected to its fiber network. By having a large percentage of its network on fiber, the service provider can more effectively deliver higher speed cloud and Ethernet services.
“We have 30,000 fiber lit fiber buildings and we have plenty of other businesses connected with copper,” McBride said.
McBride added that this established on-net footprint puts the telco in a good position to deepen customer penetration in those bulidings above 20%. It will do this by selling customers a mix of higher Ethernet speeds and IP-based applications.
“We feel like our penetration should do nothing but grow,” McBride said. “In those lit buildings, there should be no reason why someone else should be winning a sales bid.”