AT&T’s Chris Jones: ‘Humbling’ Partner Feedback Led to Alliance Channel, ACC Business Revamp

AT&T took tough but important feedback from channel partners in order to change revamp its channel programs.

Chris Jones, associate vice president of channel Sales for the AT&T Alliance Channel and ACC Business, said he and his team sat down with multiple partner advisory channels to learn about how they could improve their programs. The feedback, Jones said, often challenged him.

AT&T’s Chris Jones

“It required a lot of listening. It required a lot of humility, because AT&T is a very significant company,” Jones told Channel Futures during a sit-down at last week’s Channel Partners Conference & Expo. “We’re a very proud company. And it’s not easy always to listen to things that you don’t do well. And so we very intentionally asked a lot of questions and then tried to listen and not get defensive.”

The vendor realigned its channel programs in 2019 to create an organization that stretches across the Alliance Channel and ACC Business and specifically serves AT&T’s distribution and brokerage (formerly known as master agent) partners.

Jones also spoke to Channel Futures about how AT&T’s efforts to communicate its value as a cybersecurity provider and MSSP to partners.

We have edited the transcript for length and clarity.

Channel Futures: What’s new with AT&T Alliance Channel and ACC Business?

Chris Jones: It’s been a very exciting last year or so with the Alliance channel and ACC business. We understand that indirect is not really a one-size-fits-all approach. So inside of the Alliance Channel, we have three different go-to-market strategies that we’re working with. We have a specialty channel, which is really outbound telemarketing and door-to-door. It’s still inside indirect, but it’s unique. We have what I’ll refer to as the traditional AT&T solution provider channel, which is the the channel that AT&T has gone to market with for 20-plus years and is what most people think about when they think about AT&T. And then two years ago, we built a tech distributor/brokerage organization that I am fortunate enough to lead.

Inside of the Alliance Channel, we have those three focus areas. And it’s been really exciting to build out our program. We didn’t have a lot of relationship with the distibutors/brokerages. We’ve introduced a new compensation model. We’ve had rules of engagement changes. This year we’re seeing more agents participating with AT&T. We’re seeing the distributors/brokerages truly embracing AT&T. We’re seeing AT&T as perceived in the larger indirect space very differently than it has been with the agent community. And that leads to a lot of really positive things from a business perspective and from an expansion perspective.

At the same time, the distributors/brokerages historically are the predominant contributor into ACC business. So we have made significant investments into ACC business. It historically was a dedicated internet-focused part of the industry. We’ve launched colocation, we’ve launched SD-WAN. We’ve made infrastructure investments. ACC Business is a 22 year old business that AT&T acquired years ago, but it hasn’t been invested in a lot. So as we brought together and built the [distributor/brokerage]-focused organization, we realized that in both the Alliance Channel and in ACC business, and we needed to do things to create a two-path approach.

We offer two approaches. In the traditional Alliance Channel you can team with our direct sales force; you can collaborate with them. But then we now offer a second option, which is a non-teaming track for agents that don’t want to team and don’t want to work with a direct seller. From an AT&T perspective, I would argue we’ve gone from being perceived as very rigid and inflexible to …