8 Takeaways, Questions from Avant Special Forces Summit
Dozens of Avant partners weighed in on how life is changing for the technology advisor channel.
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Two partner leaders in Avant’s Pinnacle Club told Channel Futures they traded in their president’s club trip for extra travel credits to Special Forces Summit. They did so in order to bring their teams along. That decision reflected how many agencies view themselves as teams, rather than as an individual agent.
“In the past, one guy did it all,” Avant CEO Ian Kieninger told Channel Futures. “Most trusted advisors never ended up being bigger than five to seven people. And now you’re seeing them really accelerate and grow.”
Moving past a “lifestyle” type of business means rethinking old ways of working. For one partner, that meant recognizing the contributions of the whole team.
“Don’t you feel like a total douchebag if you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, my team sold all this but I’m gonna go take the trip?'” one CEO told Channel Futures.
Resourcive president Kyle Hall said his entire team needs to stay active on education and training to stay relevant with customers. And for him, that meant trading in a trip to the beach.
“What I’m really, really trying to do with my life right now, much more than travel all over the place, is grow my business,” Hall told Channel Futures.
As technology advisor companies add to their headcounts, TSDs are seeing that TA employees experience them differently.
Take, for instance, how different members of a large agency will interact with a sales platform like Avant’s Pathfinder. A sales rep may use Pathfinder as a Bible of sorts and celebrate updates to the platform. An operations director might be working with Avant to give feedback to fill on the platform’s back office capabilities. In the meantime, the TA owner may have moved beyond customer-facing sales and is focused on things like hiring, vendor relationships and cash flow, and, as a result, they don’t engage with Pathfinder in the same way.
The task for Avant is to provide value all the way up the org chart. Kieninger said that was an intentional focus at Special Forces, with the TSD offering operations-focused sessions.
“We’re going have to continue to expand to provide education tracks and experiences that are custom tailored to different roles within the TAs. But that didn’t that wasn’t as big of a need in the past. We recognize that. We’re seeing a lot of them really mature and get better. And we want a multifaceted relationship with them,” he told Channel Futures.
Many of the announcements and keynote speeches from Avant have touched on how data and automation will help partners scale and the industry expand. But as west sales vice president Mike Wolfington told Channel Futures, “there’s always going to be a human element.”
Kieninger touched on that in his final keynote, when he referenced the relationships he and co-founder Drew Lydecker (as well as other members of their leadership team) maintain with Avant’s leading technology advisor partners.
“Who is your coach? Who’s holding you accountable? I’d love to be part of that coaching team. Avant wants to be part of that team,” he told attendees.
That brings up a larger question Channel Futures has been asking TSD this year: what is the value of a relationship, and how do TSDs, partners and investors assess that value differently.
3DG Partners co-founder Doug Cardozo told Channel Futures earlier this year that his team sees value in the executive “access” Avant provides. He drew a comparison between Avant’s access and the access 3DG provides to its IT buyers.
“We work with customers because we’ve been in their shoes. These are people that have been in our shoes, so we can go to them and turn to them. Being able to have time with Ian and Drew is more valuable than any number of quoting resources that they can give me, and I’m picking their brain on: How do we structure our business best to build up our long-term valuation? And how should we handle growth strategies? How should we hire?” Cardozo said.
The question Channel Futures will be asking going forward is how the TSDs plan to scale that human touch as they seek to recruit and develop more and more TAs?
Probably the biggest announcement coming out of Special Forces as the Provider Analytics that now exist in the Pathfinder platform. Those analytics contain NPS scores that Avant sourced from partners who have sold deals with the providers.
The platform update builds on demand partners have made to know more quickly about the vendors they refer to their clients. For decades, agents learned about supplier pros and cons through their own skinned knees, or through word-of-mouth from their peers. And in some cases, bad vendor experiences have led to distrust toward the TSD sales engineers who recommended them.
But the update from Avant represents a larger trend an – increasing availability of crowd-sourced information about providers. The Technology Advisor Alliance hosts a forum of more than 100 partners who are sharing their insights on their favorite and least favorite vendors. Other TA leaders are forming peer groups to help each other navigate the vendor landscape.
If you’re doing a lousy job as a supplier, it’s getting harder to hide. And if you’re doing well in the eyes of partners, you might be able to close the gap between yourself and more marketing-rich peers.
“For us, I think it’s a positive,” Aryaka sales leader Craig Patterson told Channel Futures. “We encourage the transparency because we believe that support that we’re going to be offering to customers is going to be so superior and everybody else, it’s going to make it shine.”
Avant has never hidden the fact that some of the world’s largest value-added resellers (VARs) and systems integrators (SIs) sell services through Avant. Kieninger and Lydecker themselves came out of CDW, and their company recognizes companies like CDW, ePlus and SHI in an awards category separate from that of the more pure agents.
Kieninger said these partners are leaning into the TSD ecosystem and the advisor model more.
“They’re now saying, ‘I have to participate in this space.’ Hardware’s not dead. People are still making money. But they need to understand how to capture this change. They’re all building teams within these large organizations who are going to hedge the bat. And while they’re hedging, they’re making reoccuring, high value cash. That’s something we’ve talking about for decades, and it’s starting to pick up inertia.”
Kieninger pointed to the entrance of “smart money” into the advisor channel that values the residual commission streams of the agents. And for historically hardware resale-based channel partners who are looking for a way to build recurring revenue, the agency model has proven increasingly strategy, he said. Moreover, with on-prem phone hardware plummeting at boulder-weighted velocity, the agent-based UCaaS divisions within large VARs aren’t experiencing as much conflict with their hardware counterparts, Kieninger said.
“These [phone systems] are now clearly going away. They’re now seeing the light, and this is a place to come get it,” he said.
At the same time, many vendors are running both VAR and agency routes to market. Morgan Granfield, senior channel manager at the data center/colocation provider Digital Realty, said she’s curious to see if the large resellers will update their policies to make sales reps more agnostic toward the route to market.
“They may see a restructuring of the sales organizations or the comp plan to help justify all of these different routes to market, particularly in my space [colocation],” Granfield told Channel Futures. “So that the national strategic partner/VAR catches the end user the way that they’re ready to buy without it being really led by the salespeople in their own interests. Just helping the Plinko ball fall where it may land.”
Kieninger said he isn’t seeing tension between TAs and VARs that have added agency sales.
“Our community doesn’t fight over these deals very often ever, because there’s just a lot of market share,” he said.
Vendor leaders like Comcast Business’ Craig Schlagbaum have urged the TSDs to bring in more partners from outside of the channel. Kieninger himself told Channel Futures earlier this year that share-shifting is bad for the TSD industry.
Depending on who you ask, there may or may not be enough new entrants joining the agent channel. But according to some of the technology advisors at Special Forces, the pool is definitely getting more crowded.
Technology advisors have built up rich referral relationships with non-agent companies over the years. Many of those referral partners are MSPs. But Catch Advisors founder Kyle Burt said he has been more wary lately.
“I’ve had some really successful MSP referral sources. I think there’s still way there. You just have to be really clear on expectations and terms, and then keep your eye open. Watch your back. Because one day they’re just going to stop talking to you,” he told Channel Futures.
He said he views these MSP referral partners akin to the UCaaS or CCaaS supplier. And it’s certainly a trend that more MSPs are signing on with TSDs and are leaving the sourcing to the agents.
“We have to position over the top of MSPs. If you want to buy an MSP, we can help you do that,” Kyle Hall said.
But plenty of other types of companies are entering the advisor channel. TopSpin Tech founder Aram Bolduc said he sees insurance agents moving from cybersecurity policy into actual cybersecurity sales. Burt pointed to marketing agencies that are selling phone systems.
“You can’t really you can’t fault anybody. They’re all just trying to grow their businesses individually – power to them. But for those of us in the trusted advisor space, we have to just be aware of those threats,” he said.
Bolduc said people have been asking him where he plans to specialize in technology. He said he plans to do no such thing – whether it be focusing on just CCaaS or just cybersecurity. He said he plans
“We’ve always said wrap your arms around the customer and make sure that you’re asking tons of questions. Leave no daylight for someone else to come in and talk to your customer,” he told Channel Futures.
Opkalla vice president of solutions architecture Jeff Garrett pointed to a scenario where all parties involved can play a role with their unique skill sets.
“There’s a lot that goes into [selling as-a-service tech offerings] technically. And the same thing for us, where we can be more of a technical expert in cybersecurity spaces or IT spaces, but we’re not going to be cyber insurance experts, and we’re not going to be marketing experts,” Garrett said. “I think we’ve seen success in that is getting good partnerships – finding the right partnerships with other entities that do that and working in synergy with each other rather than each one trying to expand, so that as a whole we can still service a customer’s full needs.”
Jeremy Ward is the principal owner of NRM Communications, an Arizona-based company that has been providing services and solutions around Microsoft Teams calling. Ward said the company has dipped into the agency model and the Avant ecosystem when discussions of the network come up.
“We’re not experts in data connectivity and whether or not they should do SD-WAN or do it with their MPLS, and we’re not trying to be. In that case, it makes perfect sense for us to have either another partner that we’ve found that kind of complements our services, or Avant with their level of expertise,” he said.
More techology advisors are expanded their post-sales practices to help clients through the technology life cycle.
LAVA Technology Services CEO Jake Jansen said his firm signed its first professional services customer about a year and a half ago. He said the paid service is serving a multi-pronged purpose.
“It’s funding growth and scale for us quickly. It’s hard to scale in this space when you’re selling an MRR type solution that takes four or five months to install and then a couple more months before you start making money on it. So our services have been extremely valuable to our customers, but also extremely valuable to us because we’re able to reinvest that money to grow and scale the business,” Jansen told Channel Futures.
Jansen said customers are going to ask technology advisors to play a bigger role in the future.
“They’re going to say, ‘Hey, I need more help here,’ and if you’re simply referring business to other companies and just acting as a broker exclusively, there’s going to be a time and a place where you’re no longer going to have the value your customer needs, and they’re going to seek it elsewhere,” he said.
For CXponent CEO Joe Rice, the post-sale gap is one of a few key gaps buyers need help filling.
He said customers need help sorting through the information overload they get from vendors at the beginning of the sales cycle.
“The bar is like zero when it comes to trusting sales reps. The lack of trust puts the burden on the customer to find out ‘is that true for me’ and filter out what’s relevant through tons of information and choices. That’s a huge opportunity for us. I think every good broker has knows how to do that and refine requirements and bring stuff to the table,” he said.
Rice said channel partners can advise more deeply on the operating model for the technology offerings customers buy. That means giving them a deeper layout of the people involved with the product and establishing expectations about the responsibilities of the vendor.
“That’s what I see as a huge, huge opportunity in our channel to at least better understand what that looks like. That doesn’t mean we’ve got to go build super deep McKinsey-style, strategy consulting, but it’s just getting down a little bit more detail on clients for that,” he said.
While increased operational help matters for end users, it also matters for suppliers. In the agent model, vendors are on the hook for billing the customer and providing a managed service. In the meantime, technology advisors receive a monthly commission from the supplier after referring the service.
Kieninger said in his keynote that supplier community needs more than just one-time sourcing.
“The vendors want more active participation from us in customer engagement, satisfaction, support and renewals. If you think you can sell it and forget it and in three years, and it’s just going to be there for renewals guaranteed, I think we need to approach it differently,” he said.
What will the generative AI portfolio look like for TSDs and TAs? For the most part, TSD leaders have indicated that they view AI as part of a larger solution. In the near-term, it’s part of contact center, while AI may increasingly augment cybersecurity solutions in the TSD line card.
That approach makes sense to Burt, who said clients “don’t want bolt-ons.”
“They’re consolidating vendors. They’re consolidating the people that they work with. They’re trying to consolidate, conserve and do things more efficiently,” he said.
At the same time, AI is opening the door for many conversations, even technology advisors don’t have a chatbot to sell to customers.
“In the contact center, it’s providing superior customer experience, reducing costs, providing operational efficiencies and increasing revenue growth,” Rise Technology Advisors‘ Eric Ludwig said earlier this year. “Honestly, we don’t care if there is a lot of noise in the marketplace and some clients are trying to build their own ‘AI’ services … to help figure out a strategy, how to integrate with existing tech investments and where to start.”
What will the generative AI portfolio look like for TSDs and TAs? For the most part, TSD leaders have indicated that they view AI as part of a larger solution. In the near-term, it’s part of contact center, while AI may increasingly augment cybersecurity solutions in the TSD line card.
That approach makes sense to Burt, who said clients “don’t want bolt-ons.”
“They’re consolidating vendors. They’re consolidating the people that they work with. They’re trying to consolidate, conserve and do things more efficiently,” he said.
At the same time, AI is opening the door for many conversations, even technology advisors don’t have a chatbot to sell to customers.
“In the contact center, it’s providing superior customer experience, reducing costs, providing operational efficiencies and increasing revenue growth,” Rise Technology Advisors‘ Eric Ludwig said earlier this year. “Honestly, we don’t care if there is a lot of noise in the marketplace and some clients are trying to build their own ‘AI’ services … to help figure out a strategy, how to integrate with existing tech investments and where to start.”
Technology advisor firms are growing larger, and their once-shadow industry is growing more populated – according to a recent exploration of channel partner trends.
The widening of the technology advisor (agent) ecosystem showed more clearly at the recent Avant Special Forces Summit. Chicago-based technology services distributor (TSD) hosted a collection of technology suppliers and channel partners who source as-a-service technology in a commission-based agent model. Many of those partners, especially those who have spent years in the ecosystem, expressed their intrigue at the number of new faces.
Avant’s Ian Kieninger
“The fact that there’s so many new people here is blowing my mind,” Avant CEO Ian Kieninger said in a keynote address.
These partners, whom Avant refers to as “trusted advisors,” are more colloquially known as agents. They hatched out of the telecom carrier industry decades ago and have been building up customer bases and recurring commissions, all the while brokering increasingly complex technology services. Avant and many of its competitors in distribution have moved away from calling them agents. That’s in part due to the desire to use a more dignifying term and expresses more of the value these companies provide.
Channel Partner Trends: Nontraditional Agents
But it’s also because many of the new partners aren’t agents in the traditional sense. Some are national value-added resellers who have added an agency model as a “hedge” of sorts, or who are eyeing a larger pivot away from hardware sales. Others are managed service providers (MSPs) who want to own more of the customer relationship and want that ownership to include technology sourcing. Still, others come from non-technology industries. Partners pointed to companies from marketing, insurance and financial services who are trying their hand at selling as-a-service technologies.
Those nontraditional entrants are making for increasingly big tent and increasingly overlapping swim lines. Channel partners – particularly those in the agent/advisor model – shared how they’re navigating referral partnerships in light of those changes.
Several other trends are making the channel more interesting. That includes the way many technology advisor firms are hiring and scaling their organizations. Kieninger shared with Channel Futures how Avant is building a “multifaceted” approach to serving the different stakeholders at these growing partner organizations.
More than a dozen partners on-and off-the-record about their experiences working with Avant and the trends they see engaging with customers, vendors and other partners. Go through the images above to view commentary from them and Kieninger about eight channel partner trends.
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