A Wake-Up Call for Carriers' Channel Management

By Greg Howard, Co-Founder, US Telecom Group

CEOs, EVPs of Alternate Channels and Channel Managers, this is your wake-up call!

In talking to fellow agents, the consensus is that carriers just don’t want to work for the business in the channel these days. Channel management needs to wake up and hear their agents. They are the bread and butter of the channel. Do you ever wish you were a fly on the wall and could hear what agents are really talking about? Commissions? Nope. President’s Club? Nope. Here’s what you would overhear:

No Pro-Active Calls. We never hear from channel managers. We currently have more than 15 carriers and one master agency. The CMs at the master agency and one carrier are the only ones who call us. Nobody else! The others sometimes don’t even respond to quote requests. My partner and I always tell a new channel manager how to get business out of our agency. “Stay in our face. Call us all the time."  They say, “You got it." Usually, we don’t hear from them again.

“Wizard of Telecom." During a repair or outage, sometimes the length of time becomes unacceptable and you need to speak directly to the person who is working the ticket. That’s like asking to speak to the “Wizard of Oz"; nobody gets to speak to the man behind the curtain. Carriers erroneously expect that agents should accept the answer, “They’re working on it," and go away until told otherwise.

Contact Information. Channel managers and other agent-facing support people rarely have their contact info in their emails. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Three out of 15 carriers we deal with include this information as standard protocol. With the rest of them, there’s nothing! It seems to me to be a reflection of the company culture. The companies that do include contact info tend to be consistent. In talking to some of these people, I’ve learned that it’s required, as it well should be.

Home-Office Employees. I think all employees should work in an office. I know from years of managing salespeople who is scamming me and who isn’t. It makes me crazy when I am trying to get a hold of a channel manager on a Friday and they will not answer the phone, but will send me an email response, “On a conference call. What do you need?" And the funny thing is, their call seems to last from noon to 5 p.m. Of course, you learn they are heading out for the weekend or picking the kids up from school. Some channel managers are great at being available most of the time – screaming kids or not. Others seem to hide behind email or not respond at all for a day or two. We need your help to drive our business.

Greg Howard is co-founder of US Telecom Group, a telecom agency that offers a full portfolio of voice, data, internet services and wholesale electric. The company focuses is on government, non-profit, educational and enterprise accounts and specializes in managing multilocation, multibill, multicarrier accounts. Prior to co-founding US Telecom Group in 2005, Howard spent 15 years in various positions in the telecom industry. He started his telecom career with CTC selling RBOC products nationwide, then held both sales and management positions with Network Plus before running Nextel’s Government Sector as a senior government sales manager in the New York market.  He also is a former member of the Channel Partners Advisory Board.