Spectrum Enterprise Channel Chief: Direct Selling Agents Getting New Opportunities

Spectrum Enterprise is giving its direct selling agent partners more access than ever before.

That’s according to Michelle Kadlacek, vice president of the Spectrum Enterprise Channel Partner Program. Kadlacek said Spectrum has given direct selling agents access to its partner portal. As a result, these agents will join the larger aggregating agents in getting deeper visibility into their fiber orders.

Spectrum’s Michelle Kadlacek

Kadlacek said partners are demanding more APIs and automation. That includes more automated marketing tools.

“Partners want us to reduce the sales process friction, and they want us to go above and beyond to help solve their clients’ challenges,” she said.

Earnings

Spectrum Enterprise made a strong showing in Charter Communications’ latest earnings report. Charter, which owns Spectrum, reported that enterprise revenues ticked up from $622 million in the first quarter of 2020 to $638 million in the first quarter of 2021. The company made more than $1 billion in SMB revenue in the first quarter, totaling $1.6 in commercial revenue.

Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge praised the enterprise segment for bettering not just its 2020 sales, but its 2019 sales.

“And that’s despite the fact that these are complex fiber products where today, less than 25% of the time, we are meeting our customers’ CIOs in the office. So that’s a difficult sell to make when you are not in person to have a complex fiber sell, whether it’s for fiber internet access, Ethernet, unified communications, SD-WAN — and yet our sales are increasing and accelerating despite the fact that we can’t be on location to make those sells,” Rutledge said.

Kadlacek talked one-on-one with Channel Futures. She addressed feedback from partners, the company’s managed network edge solution and a promotion Spectrum is running around Ethernet.

Scroll through the slideshow above for the most important things she had to say about the channel.