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By
Bruce
Wirt
In an industry that grew up by saving
customers 10 percent on their exist-
ing bill, channel managers have been
poorly conditioned since CLECs came
into being in 1996. During the course
of 20 years, it became tougher and
tougher to get to the savings that cus-
tomers became accustomed to when
shopping for a new provider. The race
to the bottom ended in the early 2010s
when the cable companies joined the
competitive price game.
When “Big Cable” joined the
commercial telecom war, everything
changed. Channel managers that
were so used to being the low cost
provider all of the sudden became
the highest cost provider overnight,
as ILECs and MSOs started deliver-
ing big bandwidth at rock bottom
prices. The regional CLEC all but
passed away during these wars, as it
was no longer feasible for customers
to purchase a T1 when they could
get speeds more than 25 times faster
with reasonably low latency. SMBs
started turning away from CLECs
and back to the ILECs they left only
10 years prior, as the ILECs were
now the cheapest game in town.
This industry is resilient though,
and the investment money in the
competitive providers was too high for
the market to let them just roll over
and die. CLECs started to reinvent
themselves into solutions providers,
regional companies went on acquisi-
tion binges that led them to become
national powerhouses, and the dawn
of cloud service providers changed the
landscape of the industry forever. In
just less than 10 years, the entire in-
dustry went from T1 PRIs and private
MPLS WANs to cloud-based phone
systems and big bandwidth Ethernet
circuits fed into software-defined net-
working routers.
Today, the channel managers
that once went door to door asking
customers for a copy of their phone
bills for analysis have had to rein-
vent themselves into solution-based
salespeople. This hasn’t been an
easy transition by any stretch of the
imagination. In my day-to-day activi-
ties, I still see telecommunications
salespeople (both supplier side and
agent side) that attempt to start and
end the conversation on price. They
take the customers PRI and T1 bill
and say, “I can get you a brand new
phone system for the same price or
less,” not even thinking about the busi-
ness application of the system that is
currently being used.
If we play this disastrous scenario
out in an agent application, an ill-in-
formed agent will repeat that line to a
customer, then quickly ask his or her fa-
vorite supplier channel partner manager
for a quote that will “beat the price of the
incumbent.” That channel manager will
race to his support team, asking for the
best price available to beat the competi-
tion. Many times no questions are asked
about the relationship between the cus-
tomer’s existing phone system and the
operation of its business, and the price
for the service contract or hardware
support of the old system isn’t factored
into the pricing equation. This leads
to the supplier driving down to a lower
price point than necessary, and selling a
system that is a square peg to the cus-
tomer’s round hole.
Today’s channel manager cannot
play the price game and win consis-
tently. Channel managers have to be
continuously educated on technology,
good listeners and tireless workers. It’s
no longer as simple as putting together
a spreadsheet that shows monthly, an-
nual and term length savings with a few
bullet points about fantastic customer
support. Winning in 2017 requires a
level of effort that leaves many people
out in the dark wondering why they can’t
find that magic bullet again.
Instead of self-reflection, those chan-
nel managers search for new items to
use in the blame game: The pricing
is too high, we need more help from
marketing, our SPIFFs are too low, etc.
Education is the key to surviving in the
modern telecommunication salesforce.
If you aren’t growing, you are dying.
o
Bruce Wirt has 15
years in channel sales
leadership and is cur-
rently the channel chief
at Telesystem, which
includes the LSI organi-
zation as well. Connect
with him on LinkedIN to share your suc-
cess stories.
The Death
of the
Spreadsheet Sale
C
hannel managers hunger for that one
special value proposition that will put
them over the top: faster speeds, better
service, lower price, and on and on.
channel management
Channel
Vision
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May - June, 2017
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