Agents Face M&A, Vendor Challenges, 'Battle for the Soul of the Channel'

Agents Face M&A, Vendor Challenges, ‘Battle for the Soul of the Channel’

Written by James Anderson
April 13, 2022

"Your time is valuable, your expertise is incredibly valuable, if you're doing audits and giving away your expertise, you need to be charging for that," Lucas Salvage said.

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO, LAS VEGAS — Hybrid work, channel conflict, vendor relations and the rise of “super-agencies” are just a few challenges facing technology advisory firms in 2022.

An all-star panel of partner entrepreneurs shared their insights on the channel onstage at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo. The panel feature Dave Dyson, chief communication strategist at Eclipse, Michelle Hyde, president of Hyde Group, Lucas Salvage, chief revenue officer at Kairos Data Communications, Mark Venuto, chief operating officer at US Network and Kathleen Waters, founder and CEO at Creekview Group.

Enterprise

Agents are gaining more and more traction upmarket, and they’ve done it through a variety of strategies. For example, Michelle Hyde’s small shop relies on teamed selling. She said she relies heavily on partnerships to make help meet her clients needs. Venuto’s firm has bolstered its back office to ensure larger customers get all the attention they need.

These enterprise customers are a different beast, the partners said. Not only do they have more needs, but timing is a challenge. Venuto said deals will take much longer to process, and thus, commissions will take much longer to receive.

“I’ve always struggled with asking the distributors and TSBs, ‘I’m going to work on this deal for the next 18 months; can I have some of your highly paid engineers for the next year and a half?'” Dyson said.

Eclipse’s Dave Dyson

To Charge or Not to Charge

Many of the partners who have moved upmarket have also embraced charging their customer for their consulting. Salvage said the organizations he worked for historically did charge customers for consulting. However, he said he is taking a very different approach at Kairos. That’s due in part to the fact that he is going up against very different competition than before. Whereas he previously competed against direct sales teams for customers, now Salvage is competing against companies like Deloitte and Arthur Anderson. These companies charge for their consulting, and indeed, many of these customers expect to pay their technology advisers.

“Your time is valuable, your expertise is incredibly valuable and my personal feeling is that if you’re doing audits and giving away your expertise, you need to be charging for that. Because you start to think about becoming sticky within an organization or client,” Salvage said.