Gabe Petersen of Calix on Transforming BSP Marketing: From Speed Wars to Brand Engagement

The broadband industry has been selling internet the same way for decades. Gabe Petersen of Calix says it’s time to rewrite the rules.

For years, broadband service providers (BSPs) have competed on two things: speed and price. But as fiber networks overlap and competition intensifies, that playbook is becoming obsolete. Gabe Petersen of Calix, Global Director of Field Strategy, recently joined our Print to Pixel podcast to discuss why BSPs must fundamentally rethink their go-to-market strategies—and how direct mail automation fits into that evolution.

The BSP Marketing Challenge: Small Teams, Big Ambitions

Gabe Petersen of Calix has spent over 20 years in the broadband industry, with a unique background that spans accounting, finance, and customer-facing strategy. This diverse experience gives him an unusual perspective on the financial realities BSPs face—and why marketing often gets shortchanged.

“I was honestly a little surprised by how little investment from a people perspective there often is in the rural telco space,” Petersen explained. “We see many customers with a single person in marketing or half a person in marketing, and they might have 10,000 to 20,000 subscribers.”

This resource constraint isn’t just a staffing issue—it’s a strategic limitation. BSPs are building expensive fiber networks that require specific take rates to achieve profitability. Every percentage point in adoption rates dramatically impacts the bottom line. Yet the teams responsible for driving those adoption rates are often running on spreadsheets and manual processes.

The old assumption: Marketing is a cost center that can run lean.

The new reality: In a competitive fiber market, sophisticated marketing execution is what separates profitable BSPs from struggling ones.

Why Speed-Based Messaging Stops Working

Gabe challenges one of the broadband industry’s most entrenched beliefs: that customers care about fiber technology.

“I personally think that in our industry, we care a lot more about fiber than our customers do,” Petersen noted. “I see so many websites talking about the technological differences of fiber—pulses of light going through strands the size of a human hair. The customer doesn’t care about that. They just want a high level of connectivity.”

This disconnect becomes critical when BSPs try to move beyond their initial take rates. The early adopters—the enthusiasts who understand and appreciate fiber technology—sign up immediately. But reaching the next 40-50% of potential customers requires a different message entirely.

Gabe Petersen’s take rate insight: “What worked with the first customers is not what’s going to work with the other customers. For whatever reason, that message didn’t resonate with them. We’ve got to personalize that message.”

This is where BSPs get stuck. They’ve built the infrastructure. They’ve captured the easy wins. But moving from 35% to 40% take rate—the difference between struggling and thriving—requires marketing sophistication that many teams simply don’t have the tools to execute.

The Brand Imperative: Standing Out in an Overlapping Market

As fiber buildouts continue across the country, BSPs are increasingly competing in the same territories. Petersen sees brand differentiation as the critical competitive advantage moving forward.

“As more competitors come into the market, brand is going to be what separates people,” Petersen emphasized. “The traditional broadband service providers need to be really aggressive thinking about brand because the Starlinks and Amazons of the world are so strong when it comes to brand.”

This brand challenge extends beyond just having a memorable logo. It requires consistent, personalized engagement across the entire customer journey—something that’s impossible to execute manually at scale.

Petersen highlighted Go Net Speed as an example of a BSP doing brand-building right: “They’ve been really thoughtful about their brand. They have the fun mascot and other things they’ve done.” He even suggested tactical brand-building moves like creating coloring books for kids at community events or during technician home visits—memorable touchpoints that reinforce brand awareness.

From Acquisition to Engagement: The Full Customer Journey

One of Gabe Petersen of Calix’s most pointed criticisms of BSP marketing is the industry’s obsession with customer acquisition at the expense of ongoing engagement.

“It drives me insane in our industry that we spend so much time and focus at the beginning of the relationship, and then we get a customer and we just pray that we never hear from them again,” Petersen said. “We completely forget about the touchpoints that can happen across the entire journey.”

This acquisition-only mindset ignores a fundamental marketing principle: it’s easier and more profitable to sell additional services to existing customers than to acquire new ones. Yet BSPs invest heavily in acquisition campaigns while neglecting customer engagement, upsell opportunities, and churn prevention.

The engagement gap: BSPs have rich data about their customers—service usage, community demographics, household composition—but lack the tools to activate that data in personalized, automated marketing campaigns.

The Postalytics + Calix Integration: Making Personalization Possible

This is where the partnership between Postalytics and Calix Engagement Cloud addresses a critical gap in BSP marketing capabilities.

As Petersen of Calix explained: “Engagement Cloud has a ton of great data about prospects and subscribers. It allows us to be really thoughtful about personalizing campaigns. But we’re not an execution engine—there’s other great tools that exist.”

The integration enables BSPs to:

• Trigger automated direct mail campaigns based on customer data and behavior in Calix Engagement Cloud
• Personalize messaging at scale without manual intervention
• Track delivery and engagement with USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode tracking and personalized QR codes
• Measure ROI by syncing response data back into their CRM and marketing automation platforms

This transforms direct mail from a slow, project-management-intensive channel into a fast, measurable marketing tactic that can be executed by small teams.

“Your guys’ name had come up in a couple of conversations we were having with customers as we were talking about direct mail specifically,” Petersen recalled about the partnership’s origins. “I basically walked up and was like, ‘Hey, I’m Gabe. We want to figure out a way to make this work.'”

Moving Beyond Batch-and-Blast

The traditional approach to BSP direct mail—sending the same generic message to entire service areas—doesn’t work in a competitive, overlapping market. Modern BSP marketing requires:

Segmentation based on customer lifecycle stage: New movers need different messages than long-term customers or at-risk accounts.

Personalization based on household characteristics: Families with kids need parental control messaging; remote workers need reliability messaging; small business owners need dedicated support messaging.

Integration with digital touchpoints: Direct mail should be part of a coordinated multi-channel strategy, not a standalone tactic.

Rapid execution: Waiting weeks to launch a campaign means missed opportunities and wasted budget.

As Chas Rubino, Postalytics Senior Account Executive specializing in BSPs, noted: “Marketers are looking to us not just as a point solution that sends direct mail, but as thought leaders for all things marketing. They’re desperate to learn more and want to combine tactics and best practices.”

The Technology-Enabled Marketing Team

Gabe Petersen of Calix emphasized that technology integration is what allows lean BSP marketing teams to compete effectively: “They don’t have massive budgets they can throw at this problem. It’s about leveraging the technology that exists.”

This is the core challenge—and opportunity—for BSP marketers in 2025. The strategic sophistication required to compete in overlapping fiber markets is increasing, while team sizes remain small. The only way to bridge that gap is through marketing automation and integration.

Looking Ahead: The Calix Connections Event

The evolution of BSP go-to-market strategies will be a central theme at the upcoming Calix ConneXions event in Las Vegas, where Postalytics is a proud sponsor. Gabe Petersen of Calix describes how the event has transformed from a small user group to an industry-wide forum for best practices and education.

“I want people to walk away having learned something and having something they can tangibly take back to their day-to-day,” Petersen said. “The Calix ConneXions event has turned into that—people can go back to their work with tangible things that are going to positively impact what they’re doing.”

Visit Postalytics at booth 107 to see how direct mail automation integrates with Calix Engagement Cloud to make sophisticated, personalized marketing campaigns possible for lean BSP teams.

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Ready to transform your BSP marketing strategy? Learn how Postalytics makes direct mail as fast, measurable, and automated as email marketing. Schedule a demo to see the Calix integration in action.