John Leach, president of the South region, for PAETEC Communications (PAET) will take over as the leader of the company’s nationwide channel program Jan. 1. His predecessor, Chris Bantoft, was part of layoffs the CLEC made in early December. Leach has a long history working with the agent channel, going back to the early '90s running programs at BTI Communications and Telco Communications Group. Before joining PAETEC in 2007, he was CEO of Covista, which sold some assets to PAETEC in 2004. Prior to being named South region president, Leach oversaw the authorized agent sales channel in the company’s South, South Central and Mid-Atlantic regions. PHONE+ spoke to Leach in early December. What follows is an edited transcript of the full interview.
How will the layoffs impact indirect channel support in 2009?
Obviously with everything that’s gone on in the economy, everyone is looking at rightsizing their company. Everyone from Obama on down is looking at a difficult year in 2009. One of the smaller changes was in the indirect support. We will continue to provide indirect channel support that we have in the past.
We will roll out a product portfolio early in the '09 year. It will include former McLeod, so we have a unified product set and commission structure across the country.
We are looking at ways to allow agents through an agent portal to do more things on their own, which will hopefully better the support they have gotten from PAETEC and they won’t see degradation as we go forward in 2009.
Will there be fewer people in the indirect channel support team?
No, it’s remaining constant.
After several recent channel leadership changes, how are you going to maintain stability in the program?
Chris [Bantoft] has been looked at as the leader of the group. Jeff [Howe] stepped in still working with Chris in a supportive role. Chris has been the leader and the driver of the channel — both internal and external — for a number of years now. That’s been pretty stable. The landscape beneath Chris has changed over the years as we have grown in size through mergers and acquisitions and organically. I’ve worked very closely with him over the last few years and leading a number of the initiatives. We feel it’s a pretty seamless transition from him to me in that the landscape that reported up through Chris now will be reporting to me. I’ve kept close ties with all those people. Even though Jeff was in and contributed in the short time he was here, Chris was the leader of the group. Now, it will be a transition to me. So, we think it’s been fairly stable.
