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Mike Kopp, vice president of channel sales at Colt,
pointed out that as opposed to the States, where the
grid and infrastructure is less than 200 years old and
processes are somewhat standardized for provisioning,
Europe represents a hodgepodge of infrastructure and
regulatory challenges that require feet on the street to
get orders implemented and deployed properly. It’s so
complicated that many companies opt to have their sat-
ellite locations install their own, separate communica-
tions network, cut off from corporate resources. Colt’s
specialty is getting locations in disparate countries up
and running on the corporate network, so that locations
and workers can share resources, collaborate better and
lower their overhead.
“That process is local, local, local, and we manage
everything on the ground,” Kopp explained. “When you
send us an order for Frankfurt, that’s going to a local
person in Germany who knows how to get things done
there. There’s always some form that needs to be filled
out, or some department to gain approval from. In Amer-
ica we love processes. And the process in Europe is
that there is none. The fact is, you must be involved ev-
ery step of the way; you can’t trust an order to go from
one place to the next place without manually watching
it. And the steps you need to take differ from market
to market, even within the same country. We bring the
management of all of that to the table.”
100% Channel-Focused
As far as enterprise business goes in the U.S., the
indirect channel is Colt’s only sales vertical, barring a
handful of direct salespeople that sell to other carriers
and very large enterprises.
“We are 100 percent hanging our hat on the channel
community to drive sales,” Kopp said. “And the partner
community is moving towards selling international ser-
vices. They increasingly have, say, a law firm that needs
a location in Paris or London, or a retailer interested in
expanding to Tokyo. Just recently we’ve started to see
international panels at partner events. It’s a new space
for the partners, and the time is right for Colt to enter
this market.”
He added that this is helped along by the trend of
larger enterprises turning to channel partners to help them
make sense of the changing communications landscape.
“As networking becomes more complicated, their
roles as trusted advisors are opening the doors to nice-
sized accounts,” Kopp said. “The cloud, for instance,
scares the crap out of large enterprises, and the tech-
nology is moving faster than they can hire people to
keep up with it. So VARs and agents are there to save
the day. And as they move upmarket, they run into plac-
es that do need locations in London, Seoul or Rome.”
Colt’s high-touch service model extends to its chan-
nel strategy – and in fact forms its core.
“I’ve watched every deal come through the funnel
and my channel managers are talking to the customer
directly in every deal we do,” he said. “We get right up
in the opportunity to work it with our partner. We are not
just passing pricing back and forth through the agent –
it’s a completely different sale. It’s a technical sale, it’s
a comfort sale, and there are a lot of nuances about
selling internationally. Customers don’t ask for a lower
price, let’s put it that way.”
Colt also has nine channel support people in place
in the United States, which includes channel managers,
partner support specialists devoted to problem-solving,
and sales engineering. “We have a really good solid back
office, if you will,” said Kopp. “We’re not just a quote shop.”
Colt is the number two carrier behind the incumbent
in all 13 European countries in which it offers service,
and most incumbents aren’t playing ball with the channel.
However, the company, being relatively new to the U.S.
scene, has one major challenge: a lack of brand recogni-
tion on this side of the pond.
“Colt’s brand name isn’t out there yet,” he said.
“When the partner community thinks of international
opportunities, their first instinct might be to go with a
Level 3 or a CenturyLink. But what they don’t realize is
that those carriers are going to hand off that order to
either Colt or the incumbent anyway.”
Unique Products
Beyond its management and back-office capabilities,
the company is also differentiated on a product level –
most notably when it comes to capital markets.
Harkening back to its roots in the City of London,
one of the key verticals for Colt is financial services. It
offers Colt PrizmNet, which is a secure, fully managed
private extranet dedicated to capital markets, connect-
ing more than 10,000 organizations worldwide and of-
fering easy access to a wide range of content providers.
Those include market data, research and other services.
“This is an initiative that’s unique to us and differen-
tiates our capabilities,” Ferretti said. “And it’s an oppor-
tunity to help the channel gain traction in that industry.”
The company also has 24,000 lit buildings in Europe
and a cornucopia of data centers. “Companies are mov-
ing to the cloud and that’s a bit of a sweet spot for us,”
Kopp said. “All of that business that was sitting at the
customer premises is being shifted, and we have data
center bandwidth just waiting to be consumed. We are
well-positioned as an enabler of that market shift.”
Bottom line though, Colt’s value proposition for end
users and the channel alike is its supporting resources.
“When I wake up every morning and say, ‘you’ve got to
go sell your company today,’ I realize that customers and
partners conceive of what we do as a commodity,” said
Kopp. “No one likes to speak of themselves as selling a
commoditized service, because it has a stigma. But many
of us sell similar services, and a SIP trunk is a SIP trunk.
What sets us apart is our program, our infrastructure,
and the institutional and tribal knowledge of the people
we have in key roles.”
INTERNATIONAL AGENTs
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May - June 2016
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Channel
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