National Business is placing such a large emphasis into using AT&T Solution Providers. Increased SP usage has become their largest distribution strategy for 2019. Sales managers - CSE’s - ASC’s have been required to have Solution providers join weekly team meetings, town halls, and team events to make sure that there is increased utilization of solution providers even when direct account teams have shown that they do not want to participate. Many National Business employees have expressed that they are against using Solution providers as many just want to be included on sales but do not want the administrative work and project management tasks that come with ordering. It is no accident that the previous VP of National Business (Chris Percy) was asked to “retire” when he had no intention of retiring anytime soon. His replacement Randall Porter climbed up the ranks in AT&T Partner Exchange, Wholesale, and AT&T Partner solutions so he will be pushing even more usage of SPs. Direct account team sellers in National Business are being treated like second class citizens compared to SPs. A lot of investment and budgets have been tied to many AT&T Partner events instead of Direct events. The sellers are being pushed to have their customers work directly with Solution Providers. Many customers have stated that they would prefer not work with third parties but are being told that they have to. In the monthly forecasts, sales managers are requiring that CSEs list which opportunities are being assigned to which SP. Sales managers are terrified of being fired for not showing high SP usage so CSEs that are not showing participation are constantly being nudged on their one-on-ones and team meetings to have more SP participation. The GMs and Sales Managers will never write this requirement out over email to the CSEs because writing this out would show that they are forcing that these account managers to outsource their account team tasks to SPs. Most of this is being requested verbally. The direct account team quotas have been increased significantly to have a large portion of their direct new sales revenue tied to SP sales but the SPs are not directly aligned to the CSEs so they are being asked to close sales for these Solution providers. Many complex billing and order related issues have resulted from these partnerships. The SPs show up for the sales but they disappear when it’s time to clean up billing and fix order related issues. This strategy has shown significant increased SP usage but it is not being done organically. It is being pushed from the top down to cost justify eliminating direct account teams and going towards a solution provider model for businesses. We will see how this plays out.
8 replies (most recent on top)
Can’t wait until they give up on this idea. Hilarious.
As a seller on Acquisition our new GM is asking us to work with 15 SP’s. My fear is that I find the sales and then hand over to an SP to do the contract and follow through and because it’s an SP sale the company sees that I only did 50% of my quota in direct sales verse 150% in SP and I was involved in almost all of them. I love SP and fear them at the same time.
If it could be outsourced to Bangalore it would be outsourced there, instead, you will ahve more diversity in sales from outside vendors
Sounds like a mess. Just another day at the T
This is the new AT&T....the only real employees will be executives. Give Randy a raise....guess he is shooting for 30 million next year while the middle class struggles. Great person Randy is.
It is equivalent to a contractor...no longer an emplyoyee. This replaces T sales and service people.
Can you provide an example of a SP? Is it an outside company? The article is very interesting to say the least but I’m not sure I understand it completely.
No benefits, no vacaton, no pension required from AT&T to SP. They needed a new path to cut more head count. No one is safe ...very sad times.