Former Top CenturyLink Channel Exec Joins Master Agent

Lisa Miller, a former top channel executive at CenturyLink, now Lumen Technologies, is the new president and chief operating officer at master agent Spearhead Advisors.

Spearhead Advisors is a division of Spearhead Group, a Dallas-based telecommunications company. Spearhead Advisors is an IT consulting organization that serves enterprise customers.

Miller left her role as CenturyLink’s president of wholesale, indirect and SME on June 1. She joined Spearhead Advisors last month.

Spearhead Advisors’ Lisa Miller

Spearhead Advisors is a Lumen-led master agent. It also has a direct sales team, as opposed to working with subagents.

“If Lumen has a product or service, we will lead with Lumen,” Miller said. “If Lumen does not offer the product or service, then we will go out into the market.”

The master agent is Lumen-led because of Miller’s non-compete clause with CenturyLink, which rebranded as Lumen in September.

“This allows me to honor my commitment to Lumen Technologies, but also allows me to go out and start a very exciting business that not only complements Lumen, but also allows us to develop a new small business in the marketplace,” Miller said.

Miller said she also has hired former Lumen salespeople, so that makes it “very easy to have that Lumen lead.”

“We’re trained in those products,” she said. “We know the systems and tools; we know the processes. And that allows us to deliver the best customer experience to any of our customers.”

Working Closely with Lumen

Miller said one of the reasons she wanted to join Spearhead Advisors was her love for the channel.

“I’ve been in the channel for the past 11 years and have strong relationships in the marketplace,” she said. “But I also love the people at Lumen that I’ve worked with for the better part of 18 and a half years. So the beauty of taking this role is it gives me the best of both worlds. It allows me to be in a leadership position. It allows me to drive the direction of the company and allows me as well to work very closely with all of the people at Lumen to help drive the success and the customer satisfaction that I’ve grown accustomed to.”

Spearhead Technologies was a “natural next step and progression,” Miller said.

“It allows me to go back to a smaller company where I can know the names of every single employee, every single team member I can mentor, I can coach,” she said. “I can still be close to a customer. That’s what I missed in my former role when you have 2,400 employees. You can’t know all their names anymore; you can’t be intimately involved with all of your big customers. I mean, there were days I felt like I was running on a treadmill trying to keep up with three different, distinct businesses. And I had approximately 396,000 customers. So it’s just the scale was very different. And I feel that for the chapter that I’m in for my career, this is a fantastic fit.”

Miller said it made sense for her to leave CenturyLink because the company needed to go in a different direction. In addition, it believed SMBs were going to be heavily impacted by …

… the COVID-19 pandemic and she ran that business unit.

“So as they looked to gain more efficiencies and collapse businesses, it made sense for me to depart the business at that time,” she said.

Immediate Impact

Miller said she can have immediate impact with Spearhead Advisors.

“What I want to do is make certain that we keep customer satisfaction in the forefront,” she said. “I want to grow the organization, And believe me, being at CenturyLink and acquiring, I lived through 18 integrations. So I want to be very careful that I manage our growth appropriately. I want to be able to stop at every level and be able to do that so we don’t grow so fast that customers suffer because then I can’t deliver a differentiated experience.”

Spearhead Advisors’ competitors would be anyone that sells to an enterprise customer for IT and telecommunications solutions, Miller said. That includes subagents and carriers’ direct sales forces.

“What it all comes down to in my view is how well you can service that enterprise customer,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what carrier you sell, it doesn’t matter what solution you provide. If your customer at the end of the day is not willing to recommend you, then it doesn’t matter. You haven’t done your job. And so I want Spearhead Advisors to be one of the best companies at delivering great satisfaction.”

Next year is going to be a growth year for the channel, Miller said.

“I was speaking to a friend of mine at another master agent and they said it’s been crazy, and that it has been a growth year for them,” she said. “Who would have thought that? Because a carrier can’t say it’s a growth year for them, but in the channel you get to look at so many different providers, so many different services and solutions that you can provide to an end customer. The channel really, in my view, has the advantage right now. And that’s what I want to be able to leverage and take advantage of as I grow Spearhead Advisors.”