Who’s On Your Side?

Contrary to popular belief, “commissions" are not the most important criterion for telecom agents when choosing a partner program.

A summer 2011 survey of Channel Partners readers found commissions in the No. 3 spot with 37 percent rating it “very important" while another 37 percent rated it “important." What may be equally interesting is 16 percent of respondents rated commissions as “unimportant" or “very unimportant." (Eleven percent was neutral.)

Instead, “ease of provisioning" and “ease of ordering" were rated the most important characteristics of a partner program; both tied for No. 1 with 46 percent of respondents ranking them “very important," and another 35 percent ranking them “important."

“Ease of quoting" earned the No. 2 spot with 42 percent rating it “very important" and 33 percent rating it “important."

The No. 4 position was taken by “access to human sales support," with 70 percent rating it “important" or “very important."

This is good, if not surprising, news in that it proves that agents are most concerned about their suppliers’ abilities to serve the end-user customers and to operate efficiently. They understand that a point or two increase in commissions cannot make up for poor performance or unresponsiveness that ultimately results in a dissatisfied customer. What they need is for things to go right more often than not and to know that someone has their back.

That is why channel partners turn out by the hundreds to vote for the channel manager that’s in their corner. We are pleased to honor them in this issue (Pages 20-26) for their support of the channel.

CMs can be vital lifelines to suppliers’ internal processes, making sure things get done correctly to their best of their ability. But in truth, their influence cannot cover for a broken back office. Agents increasingly are concerned about the sad state of affairs that is carrier provisioning. Channel Partners Advisory Board Member Edward O’Connor, vice president of technology and sales for Total Communications Inc., wrote in an April blog that network provisioning continues to worsen instead of improve: “We agents are all worked up and our channel managers are all in frenzy, but the issues are never addressed."

This creates myriad issues aside from the most important one — customer dissatisfaction. One of these byproducts is that agents are understandably reluctant to place business with underperforming carriers. This shouldn’t be a problem as competition should take care of these laggards, but for agents it’s a huge concern in that they still have quotas to fill. No self-respecting agent would put a customer on a poor service, so they end up in breach of contract through no fault of their own.

Is there anything agents can do? We posed the question to lawyer Neil Ende with Technology Law Group, and he provided a number of expert insights.  

Selecting your supplier partners carefully is only going to become more important as carriers get into the business of delivering cloud-based IT. “Selling IT services has not been the legacy sales skill of the Tier 1 telecom service providers — nor has building downstream channel programs to recruit other solution providers, for that matter. So, how are these giants going to equally invest in their direct sales and marketing resources and build channel ecosystems to extend their reach into the burgeoning IT and cloud services market, at the same time?" Good question. See what Amazon Consulting’s recent research says on the matter.  

For partners who are looking to their core carriers to get them in the cloud business, this study and the results of our poll on partner program traits indicate there’s room for reservation.