Insist On Flexibility In Your Telecom Services Contract

The chances are excellent that you have one or more wireline and/or wireless telecom services contracts that will renew or expire during the next six months. If you are like many of our enterprise sourcing and vendor management clients, you'd prefer not to go through the time-consuming exercise of issuing a full-blown telecom RFP because you're satisfied with your service provider. However, you really want to ensure that you're paying market prices for the services you're contracting for and potentially also qualify for a renewal bonus. Review your existing telecom contracts — both wireline and wireless — to retrieve the best-achieved terms and conditions in any of them. These typically are about flexible pricing models that may include threshold spend rebates or no revenue commitment tied to specific services. Wireline contracts typically are more mature than wireless ones, so they might be the best source of reference terms and conditions. As you renegotiate for renewal, or if you decide to issue an RFP for a potential new supplier, take the best of what you see across your different telecoms contracts and use them as "reference terms" for a new contract.