Is the channel the right path to growth?
Many cloud service providers that achieve early success with a direct sales model quickly come to realize that if they want to reach their full growth potential, they will need to leverage indirect sales “channels” (VARs, MSPs, IT Solution Providers).
But pivoting to embrace the channel model is more operationally tricky than it first appears. Critical challenges arise because many aspects of the business, including business processes, the customer experience, and revenue cycles are optimized for a direct sales model. Therefore the “agent” model has evolved as the only viable channel option because it allows the indirect channel to get paid for sales, while the service provider achieves revenue growth with a minimal amount of business process or customer experience impact.
Unfortunately, for most VARs, MSPs and other IT Solution Providers, the traditional agent model can be a less than ideal scenario, when:
- You are giving away customer relationships developed over years of successful partnership
- You no longer have a revenue relationship with the customer
- You can’t control your margins
- Your top-line revenue drops through the floor
- You only get paid well after everyone else gets their share
Luckily, there is an alternative. BluLogix has partnered with AVANT to introduce an innovative offering that addresses these agent challenges head-on. AVANT and BluLogix now support “rebilling” for a network of more than a dozen – and growing – top service providers. In a rebilling scenario, the service providers’ customer experience (provisioning, onboarding, etc.) remains unchanged, but the VAR, MSP, or ITSP maintains customer ownership and is able to bill the customer for services directly.
Rebilling is a better solution for all parties involved.
- Service providers can deliver the optimum customer experience for the service, have a competitive advantage with channel partners, reduce churn, and take advantage of increased upsell opportunities.
- VARs, MSP, and ITSPs can retain ownership of the customer relationships they have worked hard to develop, recognize top-line revenue growth, and present a unified billing perspective to their customers.
- Customers are more satisfied because they can retain their relationship with their trusted advisors for strategic and revenue-related or service issues.