Posted: 08/2001

Partner Channel

Cable & Wireless Tools, Initiatives to Help Channel Partners
By Josh Long

Cable & Wireless plc (www.cw.com) is strengthening its partner program with new leadership and development of new tools and initiatives to help its agents and value-added resellers generate additional sales.

Cable & Wireless would like its channel partners to close 100 percent of all sales agreements by April 2002, says Joel S. Moss, Cable & Wireless senior vice president of Business Markets, who recently was named to head up the channel program. This goal does not apply to C&W’s direct sales relationships with its enterprise customers, totaling about 750 firms.

Moss, who gave the company guidance on its channel programs last December and came on board full-time in April, says direct sales representatives would help the channel partners close their deals. Direct sales representatives are paid the same whether they close the deal themselves or through a channel partner, says Moss. Cable & Wireless partners with approximately 240 data VARs and 150 master agents, he says.

To further its goal within the channel program, Cable & Wireless is developing tools that will create demand and will make it easier for channel partners to do business selling to small, medium-sized and large businesses.

“You have to build a program and evolve a program to allow all of the partners to be successful based on their chosen area of expertise and focus,” says Moss, who worked in the channel business for 25 years.

The following initiatives are new aspects to the channel program:

* The carrier will introduce an online configuration this summer with questions and answers, which will make it easier and faster for channel partners to design customized networks for prospective customers. The online tools guide agents and VARs through a series of questions.

* Cable & Wireless offers six courses online, where the carrier attempts to create sales-call simulations to train channel partners to react in selling scenarios.

* The carrier has hired a telesales organization to query businesses and qualify leads so that when channel partners walk into an organization, “They already know what a customer is looking for and they can go in there fully prepared,” Moss says.

* Cable & Wireless is buying lists of businesses and mailing information to approximately 200 to 300 businesses every week, Moss says. The carrier attempts to tailor the direct mail to its telesales campaign.

* The company has created seminar presentations that give channel partners the tools necessary to conduct a seminar

for prospective customers. The seminar materials may include a script and Power Point presentations on specific products

and services such as web hosting and applications. The company is trying to release new seminar materials each month,

Moss says.

* Cable & Wireless also has formed a reseller council where channel partners can discuss issues to improve the program.

Meanwhile, the carrier is neither recruiting new partners nor turning prospective ones down, Moss says.

“We need to take the existing partners we have and really work with them to learn our tools,” he adds. “As time goes on, we will recruit and hire new VARs. Most of them are very strong, intelligent people that are doing a great job, and our goal is to become a bigger provider of their services.”

Moss says future channel partnerships would include software providers, equipment manufacturers and high-end consultants. Cable & Wireless would recruit such partners through seminars, meetings, direct contact and word of mouth.