Editor's Letter: Unresolved Conflicts

A whopping 40 percent of resellers said they experienced competition from vendors’ sales organizations at least sometimes – that’s according to the inaugural Channel Performance Outlook survey published in April by the Channel Performance Board, a subgroup of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. The report, sponsored by BLUEROADS Corp., examines channel dynamics gleaned from input from 500 indirect sales channel executives, distributors, resellers and other channel representatives.

In addition to telecom agents, sales channel respondents to the survey included representatives from five other industries: IT, professional audiovisual, physical security and surveillance, office automation and consumer electronics (CE). According to the study’s authors, across the board, respondents shared much of the same optimism and frustration on various points.

Circling back to channel conflict, this certainly held true – 54 percent of telecom respondents said they experienced “some” or “a lot” of conflict with vendor organizations; CE dealers put the figure at 47 percent and IT resellers at 46 percent.

Channel partners aren’t taking this lying down. OK, some of them are. Eighteen percent said they did nothing. But, 15 percent said they were taking their business elsewhere, and 39 percent said they were confronting offending vendors. Another 17 percent said they weren’t passing lead information along to vendors.

How does telecom compare on these strategies? Fewer than one-third (27 percent) of telecom agents said they confront vendors compared to 43 percent of AV resellers, 35 percent of IT resellers and 30 percent of CE resellers. And, 19 percent of telecom respondents said they kept leads out of vendors hands compared to nearly 23 percent of IT resellers and 17 percent of CE respondents.

It follows then that the study also reveals resellers don’t think vendor field marketing reps partner with them sufficiently in cooperative selling. Forty-six percent said they do so “infrequently” or not at all. Another 36 percent said they partner with them only “sometimes.” Only 18 percent said they partner with them “frequently” or “all the time.” Depending on the channel, partnering varied widely. Only 7.5 percent of office product respondents said they engage in cooperative selling with vendors “frequently” or “all the time,” less than half of the average. By contrast, 22 percent of participants in IT and 23 percent in professional audio/video said they did so. Telecom was a bit higher, but still less than one-third at 27.3 percent.

BLUEROADS sponsored another study, published as an eBook by PHONE+ this month, which polled communications suppliers (mostly carriers) about their views of channel conflict. Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents said there is none, while another third (35 percent) said it happens less than 10 percent of the time.

Clearly, there remains a disconnect between the partner’s and vendor’s perceptions of what’s going on in the marketplace. Closing that gap is key to growing the channel for carrier services.