During our XO agent event in February, Peter Radizeski and I found ourselves in a conversation about master agents and how they qualify and develop productive sub-agents.  This conversation ultimately spawned a podcast he and I created, but this subject carries special significance for us at Telephony Partners and probably merits some deeper discussion.

For the most part, the background of our staff (myself included) lies in the VAR space.  In fact, Rick and I were once agents through our VAR companies, so we've gone through the learning curve of integrating services into the sales of related products.  Most VARs at least intellectually understand the value of diversifying their revenue streams, especially as they watch their margins go down with increased competition from national outlets like CDW and Dell, but for many the execution fails miserably.

Why is this?  There's no simple answer.  As with most things, it seems that there are far more ways to fail than to succeed.

In my opinion, one of the biggest reasons so many VARs ultimately abandon their agent aspirations has a lot to do with the expectations either purposefully or inadvertently set by their master agent. This is the first of four articles outlining common — but incorrect — expectations VARs often have, and how to turn them into opportunities.

Misconception #1: "This plugs right into my sales model."
The truth is that the VARs who are most successful selling carrier services worked very hard to change their sales model to incorporate effective service sales strategies. VARs focus their sales model on hardware and support services. Carrier services brings another element altogether.

Opportunity: Understand that carrier services materially impacts the value proposition you articulate to your customers. There are a number of ways we see VARs leverage this.

• Sell the total solution. Make the components incidental to the sale
  While this may sound like the same tired sales-speak everyone spouts, VARs that can offer and control a variety of products and services are not selling with a narrow agenda.  They can sell the results, and focus on impact dollars rather than rates and costs.
• Represent service management as an intangible value-add
  It's inevitable that someone has to manage the connection of your hardware to the services it uses. Make it more difficult for a customer to nickel and dime you with quotes from online mega-retailers by introducing a "free" service as part of your package. If everyone's selling apples, offer your customer an orange.
• Separate equipment and service sales in order to use each as a gateway to the other
  Particularly effective when used by VARs with large, mature sales infrastructures, segregating the sales processes related to equipment and carrier services allows you to up-sell customers with the secondary focus.  Leading with an equipment sale allows for an add-on of services.  Leading with a services sale allows for an add-on of equipment.

Overall, VARs should understand that, in order to be successful integrating carrier services into the business model, focused work is necessary to integrate them into the sales model.  If a VAR is told that selling services is "easy" or otherwise an afterthought of the primary reseller business, they're being set up for failure.