Channel Strategy: A Quick Look

Often I hear from channel execs that Agents aren’t the future because they aren’t moving to selling cloud and managed services fast enough. It is always the MSPs and VARs that will be the partners of the future.

Funny how different vendors are trying different things. Fonality is placing bets on both sides as they announced both a distribution deal with Ingram Micro and an exclusive deal with The (Agent) Alliance. So chasing VARs and masters at the same time.

One master agent is chasing MSPs with MITEL.

RingCentral hired an old Cbeyond exec to revamp the channel to – you guessed it – chase master agents!

This tells me a couple of things.

One is that no one has a magic bullet.

Two, the alignment of the product, the message, the customer target and the partner has not happened yet – except maybe for one provider.

Three, UCaaS just isn’t getting the traction every analyst has predicted. I have said before that selling Change is extremely challenging.

Lastly, every partner has a business plan that they are heads down scrambling to work. To switch gears to sell another service – to learn it, digest it, start selling it – is time and effort that they may not want to expend, especially when (1) the price of services is down, so the commissions collected are down. Partners have to sell twice as much to maintain. And (2) the price of the new services – 8×8 ARPU is $369 – is too little for too much effort. And why sell something that may jeopardize your relationship with the client? Also, no one has the deployment down to a science yet [see Dell survey], so that is another fumble waiting to happen. Too much risk, not enough reward.

Agree or Disagree?

Tags: channel partners, hosted pbx, master agency, msp, UC, VAR
Related tags: selling, channel, services