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

… being incredibly flexible. I would argue, we’re the only provider in the industry that has two go-to-market tracks the way we do – a teaming track and a non-teaming track – that allow agents to decide what’s best for them and their customers.

CF: I’m interested in delving into the change in perception. As you’re looking at those traditional partners (customer-facing agents), how are you seeing them evolving?

CJ: If you think about our traditional solution providers inside of the Alliance Channel, many of them are former AT&T employees. They’re very bought into AT&T. The bigger opportunity that we had over the last two to three years is really the larger subagent community that’s non-exclusive. That where we’re seeing the biggest change in perception around AT&T. And a lot of that had to do with the AT&T of the past. When we thought about going big with distributors/brokerages and subagents, we believed there were four things we had to look at to be compelling in this industry.

The first thing is, you had to have compelling products and services that customers want to buy and agents want to sell. We believe we always were successful in that space. The three areas that prevented us from being successful had to do with ease of doing business, rules of engagement and compensation. Those are areas we’re we’ve made changes over the last couple of years to really become much more attractive to the [brokerage/broker] community. Obviously the introduction of residual compensation, which we did several years back, was a big step forward. But for the subagent community, just because we changed compensation didn’t mean they were prepared to jump on board with AT&T.

These are people that have been in this space for a long time, and they’ve had opportunities over the years to experience all the ebbs and flows of providers’ indirect strategies. And we had to demonstrate to the indirect channel space that this wasn’t a phase, but that this was a strategy going forward that we were committed to. I think that’s why this year has been so exciting, because we had to hit the road. And very candidly, the first thing we had to do was work with the distributors/brokerages to make sure they understood what we were doing, why we were doing it and that we were committed to it. After we got them to understand that, then we had to go out to the actual community and make sure they understood what was going on.

I think a lot of people in indirect think you just flip the switch and everyone’s going to jump on board with you. The reality is that’s not what happened. That’s not how it works. When we built our distributor/brokerage-focused organization, we built advisory boards. We built executive advisory boards; we built operations advisory boards. And we asked for feedback. We shared what we were doing, and we asked for feedback from the distributors/brokerages about how we could approach the marketplace.

It required a lot of listening. It required a lot of humility, because AT&T is a very significant company. We’re a very proud company. And it’s not easy always to listen to things that you don’t do well. So we very intentionally asked a lot of questions and then tried to listen and not get defensive. And there was an an extended period of time where it was a challenge, because you heard a lot of things that didn’t feel good. But in order to change how we were perceived in the industry, you had to have open and honest and real conversations. But those conversations allowed us to build strategies and models and value propositions to go out to the larger community that I think resonated. I think a lot of people are pleasantly surprised at the commitment that we’ve made and the impact that we’ve made and the changes that we’ve made. But I think a lot of that comes from …