Intelisys Appoints New Sales VP, VAR Leader in Partner Segmentation PushIntelisys Appoints New Sales VP, VAR Leader in Partner Segmentation Push

ScanSource-owned tech services distributor Intelisys is advancing its goals of partner segmentation with multiple appointments and promotions.

Former Intelisys vice president of sales Bob Farbak has moved to the new position of group vice president for regional and VAR sales. The new group takes on a value-added reseller segment that Intelisys intends to pursue with more specificity. In the meantime, Intelisys has promoted Eddie Acosta, former sales leader for the Central region, to vice president of sales.

President Ken Mills said Farbak and Acosta in their new roles support Intelisys' thesis of offering unique services to the segments within its diverse partner base: traditional telecom agents, technology advisors focused on advanced tech, large "national" (superagency) partners and VARs.

Intelisys has also brought its advanced technologies group, led by Patrick Chen, under Acosta. Mills said the alignment will create closer connections between the advanced technology sales team and pre-sales solutions engineering teams at Intelisys.

In addition, Intelisys made hires in its advanced technologies group, adding Christopher Whitaker as its program director leader for mobility and IoT, and Bhu Virdi as cloud and AI programs director.

Personalizing Support for Intelisys VARs

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The term "VAR" can mean many things, Mills notes, and that's especially true in the case of ScanSource and Intelisys. ScanSource over the course of multiple years pursued a strategy of "hybrid distribution," in which it encouraged its base of barcode, point-of-sale and unified communications resellers to add Intelisys' agency-based offerings. Farbak and his new group are broadly targeting a different type of VAR, and these companies tend to be much larger. For example, Intelisys' president's club includes Presidio, NWN Carousel and Insight.

Intelisys' Bob Farbak

Large, national VARs don't always advertise themselves as operating agency/advisor practices, but they represent a significant piece of business for many of the tech services distributors (TSDs).

"I think a lot of these VARs have dabbled in the agency model, and took advantage of it more reactively as a part of the business. But all of a sudden they start to see these big wins, and they start to grow their recurring revenue stream. They start to see these nice-size commission checks come in and someone says, 'Hey, this is actually pretty good business. How do we do more of this?' We definitely want to be at the center of that opportunity," Mills told Channel Futures.

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Intelisys' Ken Mills

Putting Farbak into the VAR-facing leadership role shows Intelisys' intent to serve that market, Mills said.

"It certainly is a big part of where we think our growth is going to come from, when you look at Channel Exchange, advanced technologies and the broader ecosystem of channel partners," he said.

Prior to the formation of the group, Intelisys would have treated a large VAR "essentially like any other agent," Mills said. And that means the VAR would have talked to the same regional sales team members at Intelisys. That dynamic didn't account for the vast differences between VARs and the average tech advisor.

"If we are expecting our average partner development manager to talk to 100 agents in their region in a given month to drive business and then flip their brain to then understand how to enable and grow a massive VAR, it's hard," he said.

Intelisys thought it was important to bring a "focused team" to support the VARs. Moreover, he said it was important to recognize that VARs need different resources than agents. That goes for reward programs, MDF, marketing training and other aspects.

"Part of the partner segmentation strategy that I believe is important is, the way that we support a traditional agent that's been in the telco space forever is different than how we support a VAR," Mills said. "We have to build different value propositions, resources, tools and even people that can really bring the right relationship, the right skill set, and the right opportunity to those different partner segments."

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Acosta to Drive Segmentation Charge

Acosta worked at Intelisys for six years before moving to rival TSD Avant. He returned to Intelisys almost a year ago. Mills said Acosta brought a mix of deep industry experience and fresh thinking to Intelisys.

"I need a team that's willing to understand the history, but also willing to sit down and objectively challenge that history and say, 'What can we do better, and how can we bring even more value? Where can we go where our competitors aren't?" Mills said.

Part of that fresh thinking is the partner segmentation concept.

"I think he's going to really come in and help us push this partner segmentation from idea to execution, and his first task is to really make this happen," Mills said. "And he's already rolled up his sleeves and jumped in."

ClearSync Solutions' Richard Rodriguez said Acosta is well-regarded in the channel.

"He's been very helpful for me. They couldn't have picked anybody better for that role," Rodriguez told Channel Futures.

Rodriguez also praised Farbak for his leadership.

"He was great at support when any issues had to escalate. That wasn't very often, but he was helpful when they did," Rodriguez said.

Advanced Technologies

Whitaker most recently led Spectrotel's mobility practice and also led the mobility practice of rival TSD Telarus. Birdi worked at Flexential for the last 13 years. Their appointments, Mills said, will help Intelisys replicate its success building its CX practice.

Mills said Chen and Acosta are building out "Centers of Excellence" that will break down silos that would have prevented partners accessing certain resources outside of their regions.

"We often get cited as having the best engineering organization of any of the TSDs, but we haven't always leveraged that knowledge across all partners ... We wanted to kind of break down those regional silos and leverage the entire team," Mills said.

Rodriguez said he's happy to see Intelisys getting a new wave of investment from its parent company.

"For a while you saw a lot of investment going into the ScanSource side of the business and not so much on the Intelisys side. But if you look at the quarterly reports, Intelisys just keeps going up and up and up. It's obvious that part of the business is continuing to grow. So the fact that they're making those investments bodes well for them," he said.

A Key Question

Mills said he has been encouraging Intelisys employees to consider the question, "What is it we actually sell?" Because ultimately, Mills said, while Intelisys facilitates the sale of technologies, the technologies themselves may not be the actual product Intelisys is delivering to partners.

"They're buying our ability to support the partners for commissions management. They're buying our ability to support their order management and quoting. They're buying our ability to educate them and create thought leadership and support them when they need help in front of a customer. That's what they buy from us," Mills told Channel Futures. "The downstream effect of that is, a technology that's transacted. We're trying to shift the mindset in the organization to almost a product perspective."