- Channel Sales & Marketing
- Internet of Things (IoT) News
- Unified Communications/Contact Center
- Channel Business
2023 Tech Advisor Roundtable: 'Telco Guys' No Longer
From T1 resellers to ESG advisors, agents have matured by leaps and bounds.
![Tech advisor roundtable Tech advisor roundtable](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt351ab03612a9155c/657225f0576198040a39bd21/shutterstock_1299694894.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
William Potter/Shutterstock
Amplix chief strategy officer Dan Passacantilli left his job at XO Communications 2002 to found his own agency. He recalls the struggle for himself and fellow agents to justify their business model to potential customers.
“I came up in the world where you had to fight to be an agent. You had to fight with direct or you had to explain to a customer, 'I know my business card doesn't say AT&T, MCI or MetTel, but I can sell all those companies,’” he said.
Passacantilli and other "OG" agents on the panel recall feeling relegated in terms of what they could offer to their customers. They operated in a very small telecom niche, which didn't even originally include PBX.
Passacantilli said his business changed forever when he discovered the opportunity to source MSP services. He recalled a deal with Thrive Networks on an existing customer account that expanded wallet share in a huge way. Moreover, it made him more relevant with the customer.
Allan Jaffe, vice president of technology at Top Speed Data Communications, said his company several years ago decided to describe itself as a "technology services provider." Similarly, Passacantilli said he renamed Blue Front Telecom Group to Blue Front Technology Group to keep himself from marginalization.
“I didn't want to get known for just the telco piece, because it was it was too narrowly focused. And the IT person would put you in that box. There was the services person with the most influence. Then below them was the guy who sold the Nortel or the Avaya system. The VAR had more influence than we did. They were usually really close with the IT person or other decisionmakers. And then you would think maybe the next person would be us. Usually it was the cabling folks, because they generally worked for the PBX guy. And then it was us who brought the T1s," he said.
Profit Advisory Group president Barry Bazen recalls such a segmentation when he started his firm in 2002. However, the services technology advisors now sell have dramatically moved up the stack into IT and cloud.
“When we all started two decades ago, telecom was on one side of the street, IT was on the other, and never the two shall meet," Bazen said. "Now, if you can't talk bigger than voice, data, mobility, you're literally dinosaurs just waiting to retire.”
Jaffe agreed. Although Top Speed sells connectivity solutions, the company has added more strategy technologies.
“We have repositioned. We lead with cloud, because the circuits come with that anyway. That's the 'fries with that.' They are a race to zero, just like UC. We talk more about security today and contact center and disaster recovery and business continuity," Jaffe said.
For partners who wish to make such an evolution, the pivot will require them to overcome certain inertia amongst their customers and employees.
"Our agency has been in business for 21 years, and longtime customers know us for what we have done for them over that time. But we've also introduced new services to them," Jaffe said. "It's a hard change to make, both from the older reps side and from the customer side to think about us with that cloud-focus first.”
Amplix has been eyeing contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and customer experience (CX) solutions. Its recent purchase of InflowCX validated the immense opportunity Amplix and other partners see in CX platforms and the ancillary products and services that bolt onto them.
“When we saw all the money and change going into the contact center it was clear that along with security, CX was going to explode as a driver of spend and transformation for enterprises and advisors with the right capability could capitalize on a massive opportunity to expand their value to the end user," said Passacantilli, whose firm Blue Front Technology Group merged to create Amplix in late 2022.
Mekenzie Bazen-LeClair recently joined Profit Advisory Group as senior consultant. She hails from the health care space and will put her knowledge of the space to deepen the firm's vertical footprint.
But while Profit Advisory Group (PAG) has built a reputation for in-depth telecom audits that save midmarket and enterprise customers money, Bazen-LeClaire is bringing on an entirely new portfolio: ESG solutions.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) is a hot topic right now. Large IT vendors such as Cisco have promoted partner opportunities and incentives for hardware takebacks and sustainability initiatives. And they're doing so because they see real customer demand.
“A lot of these big companies are forming ESG committees, because their company and their business is getting measured on it. That's also been a driving factor with expediting some of the sales cycles," Bazen-LeClaire said. "The incentives and the rebates that you're seeing today are as good as they're ever going to get. Because in a year-and-a-half to two years from now, it's going to be mandated that you have this amenity at your business or your apartment complex.”
Bazen-LeClaire and PAG are offering solutions like electric vehicle (EV) charging and sensors that measure water efficiency. These solutions are particularly popular in states like California. She said some providers of these solutions have signed up with tech services distributors and offer some form of residual compensation for partners.
And PAG's foray into ESG solutions does not spell the end of its telecom pedigree. Barry Bazen noted that the firms' telecom audits can actually enable ESG investments.
“The perfect complementary play is that we go in with [EV and water filtration], they want it, and we can then find the expense reduction with a technology audit to subsidize 30% or 40% of the cost of the project, and it's net free to them," he said.
That sentiment fits perfectly with the idea of "IT cost management" (as opposed to cost-cutting) that leading technology advisors are promoting. Customers want to invest more in tech, but they need help freeing up funds to do that.
So if technology advisors are avoiding the "telco guy" stereotype, how are they branding themselves in front of their customers? Many partners, particular those that work with the TSD Avant, have leaned into the terms "trusted advisor." Some focus on the term "consultant." Others still don't mind the term "broker."
Jaffe said he still finds the independent insurance broker to be the easiest analogy to describe what Top Speed does. But at the end of the day, he takes a flexible approach.
“My customers don't care what I call myself. I just want to be the guy of whom they say, 'I've got a guy.'"
So if technology advisors are avoiding the "telco guy" stereotype, how are they branding themselves in front of their customers? Many partners, particular those that work with the TSD Avant, have leaned into the terms "trusted advisor." Some focus on the term "consultant." Others still don't mind the term "broker."
Jaffe said he still finds the independent insurance broker to be the easiest analogy to describe what Top Speed does. But at the end of the day, he takes a flexible approach.
“My customers don't care what I call myself. I just want to be the guy of whom they say, 'I've got a guy.'"
Technology advisors (agents) have evolved drastically over the last 20 years in what they sell to businesses, as well as the strategic role they play with IT buyers.
A roundtable of tech advisor partner leaders at the recent Channel Futures Leadership Summit served as a retrospective on how the agent channel has grown. The agent model, in which a channel partner sources a vendor-managed and vendor-billed service to a business customer, has increasingly found its way into more and more parts of the tech stack.
While agents previously may have paled in stature to PBX dealers and hardware VARs in the eyes of customers, their flexible business model has enabled them to adopt cloud-based services with less friction. Tech advisors are now selling CX solutions, cybersecurity, and even ESG solutions.
Go through the five images above to see highlights from the roundtable.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like