When they have the TSD talking heads on keynotes, it would be nice to have a deep dive into their cliche responses.
“”I think what we’re seeing is … there are more opportunities for advisors, and ultimately, that’s what creates a better market for customers,” Edwards said.” [source] Word salad. How would he know what my customer wants or thinks?
The channel is historically centered on SMB. It was designed that way by the Big Channel Vendors who wanted the big clients for themselves. Avaya is kind of highlighting that now, but back when there was a BellSouth, there were many protected accounts. But also the funding for the channel came from the Small Business division, so they didn’t get credit for selling to Government, Enterprise, etc.
Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, AT&T, Verizon – have all had protected accounts.
The whole idea of channel conflict is a partner chasing an account that is in Siebel.
Also, most channel orders are transactional with shorter sales cycles.
When AppDirect buys 3 companies that only offer services to large companies, I realize that (A) they don’t understand the channel any better today than in 2020 when they acquired MicroCorp; and (B) they don’t examine their own data to realize that 85-90% of the customers are SMB.
There are maybe 60 agencies servicing Enterprise accounts. Heck, even in the MSP segment only 15% service mid-market and above! It’s about 400 MSPs that service large business.
To sell to a large business requires (A) great follow up; (B) Long sales cycles; (C) selling to multiple decision makers; and (D) great discovery questions.
Most salespeople do not have great follow up skills. They do not get motivated by a long sales cycle. The lady that sells Bombardier CRJ700 jets is not going to be able to sell DIA. Different skill sets. Different motivations.
If a TSD could in fact look at their data, they would see that at least 80% of sales are still network and simple voice (SIP trunks, POTS replacement, cell phones, digital voice).
These are packaged products familiar to the Buyer. AI, IoT, IIoT, cyber-security are not packaged products. They also are NOT replacement services nor are they bundles that could carry a SKU. That means that at least 80% of the salespeople in the industry struggle with a sale.
AI companies have been hammering me for six months about getting in the channel. But they can’t tell me who the Buyer is; what the product is; what the outcome is.
Most people in telecom probably don’t know the stories about all the booms and busts — maybe they should read Caruso’s book. Putting fiber in the ground sounds an awful lot like AI and CyberSec. Lots of opportunity, lots of investor dollars, but very little actual sales revenue.
You would think after Katrina it would have been easy to sell Disaster Recovery services like backup. No. Most businesses thought it was a once in a lifetime act and since they survived, no worries. Yet many SMBs closed because they only had paper files that were lost to flooding and had no business data to go back to. But it was still hard to sell DR in NOLA!
I also think that some TSDs only talk to their top 20 partners and consider that “the market”.
I have been thinking about this quote from Intelisys’ Ken Mills:
“And I think that is really important to have the advisor play a more strategic role their customers, bring more services their customers, and leverage organizations to help them deliver [the right solutions]. … We want to bring different value propositions to customers and have our advisors start to play bigger roles in those opportunities.”
Some customers have a PBX guy, an MSP, a network guy, etc. They aren’t going to shut out one “guy” over another.
“We’re just going to continue to sell new things,” said Bridgepointe’s Evars. “There’s a huge opportunity there.”
There is a huge opportunity to sell new things, but by a tired audience of sellers who are on a treadmill, running as fast as they can to sell stuff to maintain commissions as each renewal results in less commission. They want to sell new stuff IF it is packaged to sell fast and pay fast. Is it? No.
Well, actually Net2Phone’s new AI assistant is.
The TSD answer is to sell more to each customer. That means spend more cycles with each customer to get more wallet share.
This goes against the lesson of UCaaS. One reason UCaaS isn’t every partner’s first choice to sell is because it has a longer sales cycle than just replacing dial-tone or the PBX. Also, the compensation (without SPIFFs) is not worth the sales cycle, the service delivery or the headache after.
And once again, partners don’t create demand; we supply it. There is still demand for key systems, side cars, and paging systems. Not every business – especially small business – has a desire to consume technology. They don’t have a technology team. They don’t want to slow down production while the staff learns (and fights) new tech. That’s reality even if it doesn’t fit in with the industry singing OPPORTUNITY! That’s what Frontier, Fusion, GTT, Airspan, Cyxtera, Starry, Windstream, Sungard, Covad, Focal Communications, McLeod, Northpoint, Winstar, AboveNet, MCI, 360networks and so many more said before they filed for BK.
There was a cable company that hired me to train the sales reps on selling Hosted PBX/UCaaS. The sales leader asked why sales were still slow. I asked if the comp plan had changed. No it hadn’t. So there was no penalty for not selling UCaaS. So the sales team sold what was easy.
I have managed sales teams for ISPs and MSPs and every time there isn’t a mandate to sell HPBX, the sales reps ignore it. Get quota fast and furious selling network and voice replacement.
Everyone confuses the Partner as a business genius, but in so many cases, they are just sales people who now work for themselves – not entrepreneurs. they are solopreneurs or freelancers. You know how I know they aren’t business people? The number of partners who did business with TNCI and the number that sold to private equity. We get to hear those horror stories every month on our partner call.
There are sound business people in this channel, no doubt. There are partners selling to Enterprise – Scott Levy, Dyson, ACT, Acuity – but these are not the majority. They are a niche. It takes a different set of skills to land and handle an Enterprise account. [BTW, if it was easy to land Enterprise accounts, don’t you think the vendors would do it without the channel?!]