In a push to help their Partners move away from selling traditional telco products alone and into the lucrative cloud communications, IT and mobile markets, 9 invests even more resources into its support team.
To help our readers find out more about what this move entails and how it will be implemented to help their Partners achieve their goals, we sat down with 9’s Director of Partners, Adam Cathcart to see what he had to say.
As one of the UK’s Top 10 Telco providers , with an annual turnover of £50 million, it’s clear that 9 was already a hugely successful business, so the first thing we had to ask him was why was it necessary to make the changes at all?
His response informed us that even though the business was profitable for them, their focus has and always will be on the development and success of their Partners and the revamping of their support team was implemented to help them maximise their potential.
With digital transformation (DX) causing a surge in the cloud communications, IT and mobile markets over the last decade, ensuring that their Partners can spread their wings and reap the benefits of selling value added technology from these growth industries is a prime objective.
However, Cathcart adds, simply providing the product alone is not enough and many businesses that are new to the industry are much more likely to fail if they lack the necessary support.
“Our business is focused not only on helping our Partners sell a more evolving product set such as a hosted voice service, but also to recruit and develop new Partners and we’ve really ramped up our Partner support offering to achieve this.”
In addition, 9 has also made some notable changes to its traditional Partner Management Team to help improve the level of service and support it gives to its valued clients.
“As a channel focused business, we understand that the relationship with our Partners is the life of our business, so staff are paramount to helping us develop and maintain these relationships”
Whereas before, the Partner Management Team was exclusively responsible for handling all Partner relationships, that team has now been split into three separate categories to help improve efficiency and provide excellent support to every partner equally.
Now, the Partner Management Team is still responsible for managing the relationship with Partners by helping them develop plans and assess the strategic direction of their business, but now they also have the added support of both the Technical Sales Team and Product Team.
“Across all of our products we have a product person and technical sales support, which can be called upon to assist the Partner to go out and sell. So, if we have a Partner that’s new to offering mobile, we can offer them accreditation and training to be able to go out and sell mobile, but they’ve also got this resource of our Technical Sales and Product Teams to help them make sales.”
More than just training, it seems that 9 has yet again gone that one step further to ensure Partners can close deals by sending experts out into the field with them as white label representatives.
“What we want to do is make sure that we’ve got a focus in regard to going out and finding new Partners, but we’ve also got a strategy in regard to recruiting Partners from the IT world, the mobile world and the traditional telecoms world, without impacting the relationships we currently hold.”
From here we see how 9’s new and improved Partner Management Team provides a much more diverse level of support that allows them to care for both new and existing Partners equally.
To achieve this goal, Cathcart explained that when he first came to 9, he made it his goal to assess each of the company’s employees to determine what values they had, what their strengths were, and what could be done to train them to the highest level so that 9’s Partners can benefit most from their expertise.
When asked where 9 go from here, Cathcart told us that the company will continue to develop relationships with Partners traditionally from the IT space and further expanding its unified support across multiple industries.
“Over the next five years we can expect to see the continued convergence of IT & Comms, which will keep advancing the capabilities of the technology. Our Challenge in the channel is to educate and drive user adoption.”
From this, it’s clear that 9’s main goal in the future will be to continue providing long term support for Partners and training them to understand new technologies as they arise, so they can go out into the market and sell with confidence.
Want to know more? Head over to the 9 Partner website for more information.
Read more about 9
- How 9 Helps Businesses Expand Their Portfolio with Hosted Voice
- On the ‘eve’ of New Beginnings with 9
- Investigating 9’s Latest Mobile Offering
- 9 Holds the Fort for Partners Out in the Field with a New Value-Added Services Offering
- Feel Free to Perform with 9: They Do the Job So You Can Do Yours
- 9 Of The Best From 9
- 9 Unlocks Mobile for Partners
