Since 2001, we have been in the business of helping organizations with their technology needs.  Most of our new customers come from referrals from customers, word-of-mouth, or referrals from our Independent Business Partners (IBPs). Typically, our IBPs are companies or individuals in related industries with customers who use the products and services we sell like:  hosted phones, internet connections, SD-WAN, contact center, etc.

Over the past five years, that group has expanded to include other companies or people that are not directly involved in technology, but instead have customers who might need help with one of the following:

1. Saving money on their voice and data services
2. Considering new technology for their business
3. Moving or adding locations
4. Migrating to work-from-home solutions
5. Have a contact center

Our partners refer those customer over to us. We work closely with the customer and if they end up working with any of our 150 solutions providers, then the partner is paid a commission. Partners don't need to be an expert in what we do, but instead need to have relationships and the willingness to ask those people if they need help. 

This formalized referral program empowers our partners with supplementary monthly income while providing outstanding results for their customers. We are currently accepting applications for a handful of new partners across the country. If you are interested, get started today by completing a no-obligation Partner Application below.

We look forward to helping you and your customers with all of their technology needs!

Money doesn’t grow on trees (unfortunately)
We are a technology solutions provider. The customers we work with present us with challenges, new projects, or pain they are having in their technology, and we get the fun or helping them find and execute a solution. It is challenging work but super-rewarding. However, working directly with customers is not the most-important driver for our business. Our real mission is to be a support system for other technology business-people.

Simply put, we help IT and telecom professionals create multiple streams of recurring, residual income for themselves through the sales of CityHosted, network carrier services, and cloud-deployed technologies of all kinds. We want to enable people to build stable, ever-growing, long-term income rather than the quick hits of one-time profit, spiffs, or commissions companies usually pay. Almost all of the services and products we have available payout profit or commissions on the monthly costs their customers pay for the services.

We believe strongly that we exist to help people build income stability, and freedom, so we built the City system to allow access to a robust portfolio of products and negotiate all our vendor agreements to get the best, longest-term payouts for our dealers. That access is gained by becoming a dealer for City. Our dealer program is a ready-made business model for independent technology professionals. A prospective dealer just needs to plug themself into our system and feed it opportunity to build their long-term residual income.

What kind of success can you model?
When we meet with people for the first time, one of the most common questions is “Can this work for me?” Building a technology-solutions/referral business is an excellent way for some technology professionals to build long-term residual income, but it is not a perfect for everyone. It has to align with your core business. It has to make sense. Below are a few types of technology professionals that are well-suited for the City model.

• Telecom VAR – One of our most successful dealers operates as a typical telecom VAR, they sell PBX and key systems and related communications systems and services to small and mid-sized clients. As their customers begin to move business applications to the cloud, they brought in City Hosted as their cloud-based telecom (VoIP) option. Offering City’s suite of cloud-enabled products is different from their core business because cloud-based products are sold on a per-month subscription, meaning they give up the one-time profits from system sales and instead earn monthly residual payouts on customer sales instead. The City dealership works for their business because it allows them to give every customer a cloud option to a phone system purchase rather than lose those customers to cloud-based competitors. A partnership with City also works because this dealer gains access to IT and other specialty products that their customers need. Over time, the cumulative customer base managed on the City Hosted platform provides steady, stable monthly income that smooths out the cash-flow needs of their business and protects their relationships with customers.
  
• IT VAR – We have a number of successful dealers whose primary business is the support of small to mid-size enterprise IT infrastructure. Offering communications and other technology-services from the City portfolio is a pretty natural fit to the small IT practice. These dealers are usually already the person small businesses turn to for new technology and for help sourcing anything technology related. It works because we help these dealers protect their core business from being influenced away by other vendors who may gain access to a customer by serving some other segment of their customer’s technology needs. If you’re the Office 365 go-to guy for a customer, and the customer brings in a telecom vendor who also has a favorite Office 365 guy, they could potentially take business from you. We call it ringfencing, wrapping your customer up with all the technology products and services they need so you are their total resource for everything related to the technology in their business. The City approach not only protects these IT VAR’s customer relationships but create stable monthly revenue than can make a real difference in the long-term success of their practice.
  
• Industry Superstar – Several of our most successful dealers are former telecom-industry professionals. To narrow it to one example, one of our dealers worked for a major, national carrier and was responsible for high-end, complicated customer designs and deployments. Successful Enterprise salespeople with long careers in technology tend to be Type A driver personalities and are usually success or goal-driven. They also tend to be well-regarded by their customers and well networked. Becoming a City Comm dealer opens up so many more product solutions that the company they work for limits them to. These superstars give up the safety net of big-company perks and benefits by going independent, but they gain a much-wider product portfolio and the ability to build long-term income. They leverage their expertise and connections and to get off the roller coaster of big-company sales quotas, bonuses, and short-term focused commissions programs. This type of dealer also is the most likely to work with Enterprise-scale customers. Rather than build income in multiples of a few-hundred dollars a month in commissions, they are more likely to land single customers with commission potential in the tens of thousands of dollars per month (ask me for examples because I have them).
  
• Single-Solution Hero – We have a few dealers who really only need us for one particular product. A great example is a vendor who serves customers with all their networking needs and supports their in-house Cisco VoIP systems. To make the Cisco VoIP work at all the locations he’s responsible for, it requires constant provisioning of SIP trunking. By running all the SIP trunking in partnership with us, the dealer has been able to turn a service that he would normally just refer off to a third party into a long-term residual revenue stream. Being a City dealer works because we act as a service he provides for his customers and does not detract from his primary business. We back him up, do all the research for his customer’s needs, setup the agreements, oversee the provisioning of service, and even act as Tier 1 support for his customers with these services. Your need may not be SIP trunks, maybe it’s long-distance services, private-line network services, SD-WAN. Whatever it is, partner with us and we can monetize it for you.
  
• Vertical Industry Specialist – One of our most-successful up-and-coming dealers is the example of what I call a Vertical Industry Specialist. Similar to the Industry Superstar, this is a professional who is deeply experienced and/or well networked in a particular vertical market. One example is a dealer who is a former school-district administrator or district-level IT professional. Well-networked in the public and private education community in their state, they work as a consultant with education entities on IT planning issues. Working with City allows them to bring focused, education-targeted communications and network products to their network of clients. It works because we have (and found when we didn’t have) vendors that excel in the education space. Another example of the Vertical Industry Specialist is a dealer of ours who services medical equipment in dental offices. Because of the technical nature of his work and relationship with the managing partners of the practices he services, he is able to recommend (and monetize) the products in our portfolio.
  
• Dedicated Cloud Business – Our most successful dealers are the ones dedicated to building an independent practice using their relationship with us and the products in our portfolio. They build independent businesses by both selling products from the portfolio direct to customer (and yielding full residual commissions) but also by finding and setting up agreements with sub-agents to help other business people to thrive as well. This is a unique, fully-independent business model that takes little to no overhead to get started and offers unlimited up-side earnings. It works, for the right kind of person, because it rewards someone who wants to build their own thing without the risk of laying out capital to fund a new business venture, someone who wants to be rewarded greatly for how valuable they are to their customers.

That’s a quick rundown of the types of people that work with us and succeed as dealers. What about you? Do you yourself in any of these examples? Interested in becoming a dealer? Reach out to us. We’ll hook you up.
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City Communications is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. We offer fully-managed Voice over IP telephone systems for business, carrier services, telecom management, and sales, installation and support for over a hundred cloud-based communications products and services. We offer a dealer program that allows technology professionals to create long-term residual income from the sales of all the products in our portfolio. Contact us for more information. 

The City Communications Partner Portal is your main resource for product supportOur primary mission is to help you bring telecom services to your customers; to support you with a rich product portfolio and consultative sales assistance that helps you win customers and post-sales support that makes them stick with you. When you become a dealer or an agent, we do everything we can to support you, including giving you exclusive access to our Partner Page.
The Partner page is our main repository of product information and sales tools for our dealers and agents. It contains links to the people inside City that you need to know, access to the pricing and quoting tools you’ll need to put out proposals, and current, relevant product information on everything in our portfolio.
If you haven’t already, sign up for a password and log in to the partner page. Here’s what you’ll find there:

Staff Directory for instant access to your support team:
Even though you have a dedicated Channel Manager who is your primary contact with City, we understand that closing new business or keeping a customer happy sometimes means you need help right now. One way you can find that help is by using the Partner Page staff directory.
The City team consists of a dozen or so staffers, each dedicated to different areas of the business; sales, technical support, customer service, billing and accounting, etc. We are all technology veterans. Almost everyone of the team has worked 15 or more years for carriers, manufacturers, as telecom managers, or as independent technology specialists. Together, we account for over 250-years of experience in every aspect of technology – negotiating agreements, managing services, designing high-end contact centers, installing and running every kind of system from tiny key systems to carrier switches (and so on).
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Located first in the Partner Page, the directory of City staff includes a brief paragraph about each person’s role within the company.

Product pages that are ready with information and guidance to help you make sales:The main function of the Partner Page is to serve as your central repository for all of the products in your City portfolio. As new products roll into the portfolio, we’ll add them here. As the suppliers revise and improve their products, we’ll update this page.
The main portfolio section displays a logo for each product by name. Click the link and you’ll be redirected to the product page for that portfolio item. Each portfolio page contains a written overview of the product, guidance on identifying the right kind of customer for that product, information on how to get sales help or post-sales support, and notes on the vendor(s) and commission payouts.

Additional information on the Partner Page:Besides the three main sections, the Partner Page also contains customer sales and training videos, email templates to help you market the products in our portfolio, and links to our latest blog articles.
As always, contact you Channel Manager with questions, help getting a login to the Partner Page, or sales support. Or feel free to reach out to any of us for any reason. You can access the Partner Page at this link.
Email me if there’s more you’d like to see in our Partner Page.

Windstream and City Communications moves an enterprise-class contact center to a CCaaS solution in the cloud for major energy services provider.

As one of the largest retail providers of electric, natural gas and home services in North America—with its parent company based in Europe—a major energy services provider processed approximately 1.3 million calls per month for sales and customer service. The Company views every call as an opportunity, either to win a new client, or provide great customer service, and has set a goal of rst call resolution as a top priority.
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To deliver on its goal, it came to Windstream for an advanced contact center solution. A long-standing relationship and multiple successes deploying Windstream network services with City Communications secured the motivation to move forward.

Windstream just announced their top partners for 2016 and City Communications was ranked number two for 2016. City has consistently been a top partner of Windstream in large part to growing business within the UCaaS/CCaas, MPLS, and Contact Center segments. City also completed a number of large implementations with key customers such as Direct Energy, Empereon, and Preferred Homecare to round out the year.
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City has worked closely with Windstream on a number of their initiatives such as UCaaS, CCaaS, SD WAN, MPLS, and fiber to bring complete voice and data solutions to businesses of all sizes across the country.


Part of the success is due to the fact that City believes offering their customers choices from a number of different carriers and allowing the customer to make the best choice for his or her business.  To set up a free, no-cost consultation, click here.

Representatives from City Communications be at the IAUG (International Avaya User Group) conference in Orlando, FL June 5-9th, 2016.  John Casas will be appearing on a panel representatives from Windstream and also Direct Energy to discuss leveraging CCaaS/UCaaS for Corporate Growth.  City is currently working with a number companies interested in leveraging both of these options.


What is UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service)?UCaaS is a delivery model where a variety of communications services and applications are delivered to the customer over an Internet connection by a third-party vendor.


What is CCaas (Contact Center as a Service)?CCaaS is a delivery model where a your communications services, applications, and equipment needed to run your contact center are provided by a third-party vendor typically over the Internet.  It allows you to quickly open and grow your contact center while only paying for what you need, rather than incurring large capital expenses.


Schedule a Breakout SessionCity will also be available for breakout sessions following the presentation.  Contact us to reserve some time or schedule a separate call to discuss your needs.


Visit Booth #355We will be at the Windstream booth #355 at the conference throughout the day on June 7th.  Stop by or contact us.