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

… truly listening and understanding.

CF: I remember when you said that during the panel at Avant Special Forces. I was surprised because I think every large carrier would hear feedback they didn’t like to hear from partners. But to be candid about that and talk about it must gain you some credibility.

CJ: I was very intentional in how we did the advisory board. We had a very small group of AT&T people there. And my guiding principle was that we spend 20% of the time talking and 80% of the time listening. That forces the conversation to be about, “What is happening that causes someone to work with someone else versus working with AT&T?” And it was humbling. But very honestly, I think the industry wants AT&T to be in the industry. I think that customers want our products, our solutions and what we bring to the table. I don’t want to say that people in this building were rooting for us. But I think that people were hoping that we would do these things, which I think is why we’re having the success that we’re now having.

CF: Are there any updates with the people involved in in ACC and Alliance Channel?

CJ: Nothing new in the last 90 days, but one of the things we did as we built this organization was make industry hires. We hired Justin Lyle-Purdy [regional sales director], Nikki Beck [national channel manager], and Jackie Steinberg [partner development manager]. They’re all part of our leadership team. We have channel managers that we hired. We have people that came from legacy AT&T and we have people that came from legacy ACC Business. Also, we have people that came from the industry. And we even have people that came from the AT&T direct sales force.

By bringing them all together, there wasn’t one way to do it. We had a lot of different perspectives that we brought forward. And I think making some of the industry hires that we did really helped us to understand how you succeed in working with the distributors/brokerages and the adviser/broker community, whereas with our minimal relationship over the years, we could make assumptions. But if you hire people that truly do this, it helps you understand how to work with them better.

CF: Where are partners finding success technologically. I know ACC expanded its portfolio. Are you seeing an uptick in a particular technology? 

CJ: Beyond core connectivity, the two areas that are very exciting to us are cybersecurity and 5G. Think about the impacts of the last 24 months and COVID and COVID phase two (wherever we are today). Companies all over the country picked up employees and sent them all over the place. It took the historically very locked-up security profile of an enterprise and kind of turned it on its head, when you have all your employees walking out of the building with their computers and setting up at home or wherever. And I think it created an incredible opportunity for the hacker community. There are so many more endpoints that are now accessible for hackers to hack into. They don’t need to hack into corporate headquarters; they need to find an endpoint that lets them in. Once they’re inside the network, they can get wherever they want to be.

If you think back to that infamous March in 2020, instantly everyone was trying to move to work-from-home environment. There was a lot of migration to the cloud that occurred in 2020, and it created all of these endpoint opportunities for hackers. What we’re really talking to the industry about right now is, we owe it to customers to circle back with them and make sure that in our new hybrid work environment where you have some people in corporate offices and a lot of people still working from home, how do you protect that new network? How do you protect that new design and make sure that all of those endpoints are truly secure? Certainly, if you look at the news, there’s a lot of opportunity to see the value of cybersecurity and the protection that’s required. And we believe that’s a big opportunity for AT&T.

The other thing that I would say is with the advent of 5G, there are a lot of really exciting applications that are coming. And I think that wireless is moving beyond just smartphones and tablets. IoT is not something that’s new. IoT has been around for a long time. But I think that with the rollout of 5G it’s going to …