The end of the year brings with it a lot of best-of-year competitions and a lot of awards, as companies who have been working hard all year to develop new and improved solutions to the problems business and regular users face every day. One of these awards has recently gone to Cbeyond (News - Alert) (News - Alert), landing them the 2012 Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) Award for Competitive Strategy Leadership.

Frost & Sullivan gave the nod to Cbeyond after seeing the market in which Cbeyond found itself trying to compete. Plagued by threats on all sides--especially since Cbeyond is operating in the hotly contested voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking services markets--Cbeyond had to get innovative for the sake of its own survival. That meant a whole new way of looking at their sales and marketing efforts.

So Cbeyond, faced with threats from its much, much larger competitors, focused on a combination of direct selling and putting a lot of focus on its target market, yielding solid results overall and catching the attention of Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert). It's not hard to catch attention, after all, when the business in question ranks in the top five firms in North American VoIP access and SIP trunking services for 2012.

Cbeyond's focus on its target market allowed it to better tailor solutions to customer needs, showing the added value of their services and making buying decisions--as well as the decision to buy--a lot easier for companies to undertake. Moreover, Cbeyond brings in recent market research statistics in a bid to figure out just what companies need, and does its best to provide those things. Even better, it also gives Cbeyond an extra look at just what may be coming down the pike from their competitors, and gets them ready to prepare counter-objections accordingly for their sales efforts.

Thanks to these factors, Cbeyond has higher attachment rates than a good chunk of its competition, and that in turn yields better results for Cbeyond, giving Frost & Sullivan all the reason they needed to endorse Cbeyond with its award.

These are tough times for small businesses. With increasing regulation on one side and increasing competition over progressively fewer buyers on the other, it's tough to make sales and bring in income. But as Cbeyond has shown quite thoroughly--thoroughly enough to make Frost & Sullivan give them an award for doing just this--using market information to effectively tailor product releases to what people need is going to go a long way in making sales happen.

Cbeyond has a lot working against it in this market, but their successful use of information is going to do a lot of good on their part to give them the best chance at making sales they can get.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert) (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.