CHANNEL MANAGEMENT there, but they cannot be recruited the same way the traditional agent is. Usually, these partners have their own intellectual property that they are selling – and everything else is ancillary. Therefore, vendors need to understand what aligned and ancillary partners look like and need. Two very different animals. CPA firms have taken on telecom expense management (TEM) with some even playing the part as the technology partner. Not all CPA firms like the partner part since it does not bring in enough income to put the worries of conflict of interest to bed. Transactional salespeople that can sell network and voice struggle to sell non-transactional services. The ARPU on network and voice has steadily declined – even at the ILECs that are trying to survive a deep decline in wireline revenue. The transactional sales rep needs to make more and more deals to stay afloat. That partner does not have the time or inclination to learn new products and how to sell them – unless they are very adjacent to what is currently selling and is almost as easy to close. How many products fit that bill? Not many. Transactional salespeople are motivated by quick sales. This is what keeps them going. Someone who sells a Boeing airplane would not do well selling broadband. The whale hunter enjoys the hunt – and landing a huge deal. Beyond the motivation to sell is the skill set of follow up, research, preparation, presentation and more that is required for a long sales cycle. CCaaS has a nine month to one-year average sales cycle, according to analysts. Someone happy selling transactions of broadband, 5G, POTS and the like would not enjoy a one-year cycle. One vendor asked me about VARs as partners. Channel Partners spent a couple of years trying to marry up VARs with agents. Several TSBs launched programs around VARs to little output. A distributor acquired a TSB and mistakenly thought that the two companies would cross-pollinate. VARs didn’t gravitate to sell telecom and agents weren’t pushing gear. The business models are entirely different. Value added resellers have a business model wrapped around a vendor or two, such as Dell, HP or Cisco. To maintain gold status, they need to sell that vendor first. If they lose status, it hurts customer service and margins. Additionally, the business model has technicians on payroll, who need to be kept busy, billing, in order to sustain payroll. VARs and interconnects (the on-premises PBX partners) have a similar business model. For the VAR to bring on a line of business separate from its main vendor, it would need to be profitable, fairly easy and ancillary. We have seen many vendors try to make the shift from a hardware business to a monthly recurring business and fail. It is a shift in skill sets, financial model, sales and service. Also, VARs traditionally are concerned with LAN and IT, not WAN and telecom. Ordering something from Ingram to be shipped to a customer is a fairly straightforward process that can be tracked. Installing an internet circuit or UCaaS service is not straight forward nor transparent. FOC dates used to be real; now they are just randomly generated numbers. So where is the growth in channel output going to come from? A marketplace? An industry changing platform? Likely, it will take a number of approaches to find good-fit partners that will sell, recommend or incorporate telecommunications and software into their packages. It won’t be one silver bullet. o Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consulting agency. He is a sales trainer, writer, consultant and speaker. He is available to speak at your events on channel, marketing, strategy or sales. Source: Forr Types of Services Sold by MSPs Source: CompTIA, 2022 Despite Increased Spending in IT, Complexity Continues to Rise How has your business benefitted from conversation intelligence? Source: Observe.AI Source: Car U.S. Fix agree or stro gly agree it has created more transparency in their c ntact center Strongly agree Agree Not sure Disagree Strongly Disagree agree or strongly agree it has enabled better agent coaching agree or strongly agree it has helped improve agent performance programs agree or strongly agree it has helped improve their ability to engage with customers agree or strongly agree it has helped them assign agents to the right tasks agree or strongly agree it has helped bring down overall operating costs agree or strongly agree it has helped improve their products or services agree or strongly agree it has helped them make strategic business decisions Source: Datto’s Global State of MSP, 2020 Network services Business services Helpdesk/IT support services Cloud services Storage services Desktop/remote work services Cybersecurity services Internet of things Backup and recovery services Application/SaaS services Telecom/Videoconferencing Print services 57% 59% 57% 55% 54% 52% 50% 50% 49% 46% 31% 23% 96% 94% 89% 89% 91% 87% 90% 92% Better abilit detection an More autom More efficie attack iteml Better detec undetected Improved th 13.50 12.00 10.50 9.00 7.50 6.00 4.50 3.00 1.50 00.0 Millions of subscribers CHANNELV ISION | JULY - AUGUST 2022 38
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