FairPoint appoints Leary to lead business service sales

FairPoint has named Lisa Leary as its new VP of business sales where she will oversee the telco's efforts in the enterprise and business market segments.

A 20-year telecom veteran, Leary will lead FairPoint's direct sales force that provides services to northern New England-based businesses.

She will guide the company's sales team in selling its growing set of advanced services, including Ethernet, VoIP, data center colocation, managed services and its newly launched Construction Services line.

Leary comes to the role with plenty of sales experience in a number of key growing areas for FairPoint like cloud services, security, call center and collaboration, unified communications, data center applications and network sales, stemming from former positions at Avaya, Siemens and EarthLink.

Before coming to FairPoint as assistant VP of business markets last August, she served as VP of Sales at CafeX, a Boston-based startup where she delivered Web and mobile-enabled software applications and products through Cisco Teams and Channel Partners.

As FairPoint continues to see its legacy voice business revenues decline, the service provider has been enhancing its business service set with new services such as Hosted PBX, which allows small, medium and large businesses to either eliminate or significantly reduce hardware and software costs.

It is already seeing the benefits of the Hosted PBX service, with the installation of a 1,250 hosted PBX solution in New Hampshire, for example.

Another key area of growth is Ethernet. During the second quarter, the telco reported that Ethernet contributed nearly $23.5 million of revenue or 11 percent of total revenue, up from $20.9 million or 9.3 percent of total revenue a year ago, as retail and wholesale Ethernet circuits grew 28 percent year-over-year.

Besides traditional network services, Leary's sales team could be a bridge for the company's new Construction Services unit. While providing turnkey wireless backhaul service is the initial focus, the team could also upsell new and existing business clients on that unit's ability to support structured cabling and inside wiring to accommodate a wholesale customer's installation for new or existing networks, user installs, campus wiring or wiring to support wireless access points.

For more:
- see the release

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