There is a Talent problem. There are far too many musical chairs.

Why is that a problem?

You cannot execute strategy when personnel shift that much, just as strategy cannot be established when executives churn. ou cannot execute on strategy when people are missing or replaced midstream.

The company looks unstable.

The talent drain has also resulted in a domain knowledge drain. Quite frankly that means they don’t where things are and how things have been done to keep things working. It isn’t well documented, especially fiber maps.

It also means that customers can’t get simple things done like MACs without a lot of heavy lifting.

Understandably with the volume of M&A activity we have witnessed just in the last two years, there will be a lot of musical chairs, but it is even more than that. Partners see it in the channel with CM/PMs coming and going, which some will say has always been the case. It seems they are jumping around more often and faster (the stint at a new company is shorter).

I don’t have an answer for it. It makes me wonder about the underpinnings of quite a few organizations when the people keep rotating in and out. It also makes me wonder about the long term viability of certain companies because no ship turns on a dime. Any strategy takes time to take hold, be executed and demonstrate results. We aren’t giving some orgs the necessary time.

This industry just doesn’t understand how to sell or market. No Value Proposition. No Laddering. No Positioning. Not even clear internal communications of how your product is better than the competition. So we have Price.

Now we have a price war. (It may lead to a SPIFF war, which would be great for partners!)

Recently, 8×8 launched 8×8 Express which “includes voice, video and chat, so there’s one application handling all of your communications needs at just $12 per month.” It is self-provisioned, e-commerce and the phone is extra. But we are $12 for a seat now. Normally the prospect would need a thousand seats for that price.

Since GoTo acquired Jive they have been quiet. Recently, they launched a bunch of Jive & GoTo for $15 per user.

I have seen TPX at $15 with the phone included.

To keep Wall Street happy, there has to be continued growth. To do that, you have to change something up, so price.

Now 8×8 might be doing this to crank up the ecommerce sales division. (It puts it in conflict with other sales channels!) Self-serve with 30 days to use it. There will indeed be a lot of churn on this. Maybe they are okay with that. No idea how much support or what kind of support the product has. No idea all the details – just that the seat is $12.

Now if a customer on 8×8 coming off contract, she would want that $12 a seat to stay with 8×8. There is no install. I already have the phone and the service. Now she just wants the market price the provider just set.

Do the other platform UC providers follow suit? Will Vonage leverage the Nexmo engine to offer a $11 basic webRTC feature set with chat and SMS?

One of the reasons that UC doesn’t have demand is that it constantly changes. IP Centrex, Hosted PBX, Virtual PBX, UC, UC&C and so many more acronyms for this product.

A majority of the businesses in the US are small business – less than 100 seats. No one seems to want that business – and quite frankly most businesses just want what they have only cheaper.

Granite is a billion dollar reseller of POTS and PRI, so we know that there is still demand for the legacy copper stuff. The 450+ independent RLECs are still selling POTS and PRI – at ridiculous margin too!

Only way to get people to change is to offer them something they cannot say no to.

The bundle that would work: cellular bundled with the webRTC features, softphones, portal, SMS/chat, and the ACD. Some provider have this to a degree but no one bundles it for small business to pull it off the shelf. It is not SKU’ed for easy consumption.

How many cell phones do you want? How many DIDs? How many will need text? Do you want to do SMS marketing? Do you want video calls? How many? In a step by step process like buying a domain. And Bingo!

When I look at the channel shows, it is MSP morning, noon and night. At CPEv in DC there will be a whopping 3 sessions aimed at agents. The rest is an MSP-centric show.

Most channel shows and programs seem to cater to MSPs now. And MSPs already have 5 shows a month to attend!

Most keynotes and channel influencers seem to be talking about MSPs – even when they are not. I sometimes wonder if some of these folks have any idea what constitutes the channel. It is made up of a number of very different business types.

MSPs and VARs are not the same. One deals with managed IT on a recurring contract; one deals with install and break/fix. VARs rely heavily on their vendors – Cisco, Juniper, ADTRAN, HP, Dell – in their business model. Keeping their gold status with a vendor is a primary concern, since getting top support (and top discounts) is how they are able to retain customers. [Inter-connects had a similar model just with PBX vendors like Avaya.]

For years there were specialists and seminars to help VARs become MSPs. To help them switch the mindset and the business model, but when you rely on hardware sales to cash flow and compensate salespeople, it isn’t always so easy to convert the business model.

Everyone is selling some kind of managed service today – managed router, firewall, wi-fi – but that doesn’t make them an MSP. Every business likes recurring revenue that doesn’t mean that the rest of the revenue streams can be ignored.

There is an emerging segment made up of developers who program integrations and manage applications for companies (now called ISVs formerly SIs). With open APIs now widely established, someone has to do the dirty work of making sure the data in one program speaks to another program properly. (It is not as simple as log in and Bingo!). CPaaS and SaaS providers are courting this group. One analyst suggested that MSPs also have this skill-set – some do in a limited fashion, but that is like calling CapGemini an MSP.

For a few years, Virgo tried to get VARs and Agents to marry. Then for several years the keynotes said agents were dying or dead. Then all the prattle was morph into an MSP or ISV if you want to survive. Speakers demonstrate time and again how far removed they are from the actual channel partners.

I get that some of the talk is rhetoric to get buzz. Yet there is much evidence that the speakers just don’t understand the channel.

The channel has morphed in a lot of ways in the last 5 years. Microsoft partners took a huge hit when Office365 launched. Many became .NET developers as opposed to a SaaS sales force. (Twenty five cents per inbox per month doesn’t cover even one support call.)

Cisco has been have a tug of war with its partners, trying to get them to push Webex as opposed to switches.

AT&T and Verizon are just 2 of the telecom vendors who have changed their programs in big sweeping ways. For AT&T, moving to a monthly commission structure after years of being an upfront payer, broke some partners. Cash flow in those partners’ business ended.

Office Depot didn’t even give the channel a shot. (Two years is not enough time to build a channel.)

So many other vendors come to the channel unprepared and really unavailable. One recently was talking about building up an affiliate program for their channel. That is a watered down version of a referral model. That isn’t going to attract much interest.

I won’t go into why so many programs are ineffective except to say that they don’t know how to align – align their product and services with a target and align their partners with their program and products. Anyone can fog a mirror and ink an agreement; it is AFTER the ink that the real work begins in on-boarding and alignment.

One factor: know which segment you are aiming for.

STC doesn’t allow their members to take money from a vendor. CPA firms are leery of taking money from vendors as well. Many TEM firms try to stay neutral. They might be excellent candidates for a referral program though.

For some MSPs who are billing a customer $2-5K per month for managed IT, they don’t want to jeopardize the account for another $200 in commission from a UCaaS provider. That is a hurdle that cannot be ignored – especially when service delivery and customer experience in the UC space is not pillars.

If I am a VAR or MSP selling managed firewall, I would want to sell cable or a reseller, who won’t try to push their own managed firewall on to the customer. Managed router and firewall are some pretty lucrative contracts. Once again, the $150 per month in commission on the pipe isn’t much compared to the TCV (total customer value).

The other consideration is that the owner of the partner business has to maximize his staff and their skills. The emphasis is on the skill set available. Oft times that is misaligned with the vendor’s newest mission.

The Channel is a whole collection of shoes. It isn’t one size fits all. You wouldn’t wear sneakers with a tux or go jogging in crocs. The two main factors are business model and skill set. Stop treating it as one homogeneous pool. Stop saying partner when you really mean VAR or MSP or ISV. It makes a difference.

In a round table partner discussion last week at Microcorp’s One on One in Atlanta, newbies to SD-WAN were learning from the partners who have been selling SD-WAN for more than a year.

One question was What triggers an SD-WAN sale (if the business isn’t already shopping for it)? There were 4 factors:

1. The business has rolled out another cloud application (like an upgrade to Microsoft Teams). This would put added stress on the Internet feed and reduce traffic on the MPLS.

2. It is time to renew licenses for firewalls. At this time, the business could shift that budget item to an SD-WAN deployment. Most SD-WAN providers have firewall options.

3. If the business migrated to UCaaS or Contact Center and are experiencing poor call quality or poor performance (of any cloud app really), then SD-WAN should be discussed as a way to improve performance, improve network resilience and add redundancy.

4. Are there any mission critical apps that the business must access every minute? Where is that application housed?

And 4.5, if the business is expanding, they can utilize SD-WAN to augment their existing MPLS network.

Seth Godin wrote a blog this week called Ten Words per Page. This applies to ads and memos and emails, but it also applies to your presentation (your slide deck). What point are you trying to make?

People listen about 8 minutes per hour. Or rather they only hear about one nugget per hour. And if their ass is numb even less.

Presenting is also about entertaining. Mary Meeker’s Internet Report made a point: “Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate.” That means social media has tuned people into images instead of words. So no more than 10 words per slide. Or even better no more than 10 words per deck!!! Have a script that you read if you want — but that slide deck should just be highlighting the ten words you want people to remember!!

What one nugget do you need people to take away? Repeat it. Highlight it. Everything should point to that nugget.

EXTRA NOTE specifically on UCaaS:

Had a discussion with a UC channel director yesterday about this very subject. About how the company has 3 product offerings – HCS, BSFT, CCC – and how to discuss it with partners. Pick one. Then pick another one. Then pick another. For each, be concrete, be specific. For example, we often sell our HCS offering to companies that want a whole Cisco experience and have 100-199 seats.

Chuck Piazza did this at Smoothstone, repeatedly saying that 75+ seats was where they played. Then describing the Help button and the customer service department (level 1 and level 2). You need to be THAT specific.