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channel management
However, not everyone is convinced
that bigger is always better. Many in-
dividuals believe in the tried-and-true
notion of “quality over quantity.”
Consider longtime master agency
Telegration. For founder Denis Raue
and company, success is less about
being the biggest and more about
working with the best, and doing it bet-
ter than their competitors.
“We are a boutique master agent for
top performers,” says Tim Basa, who
recently was brought on by Raue to
serve as president of Telegration. “We
don’t have 4,000 sub-agents; that’s not
our model. We have a curated group
of high-performing sales partners that
interact with us every day.”
Sometimes it seems the whole
world is focused on exponential growth
whereas, “We want to be the best part-
ner for the best partners,” says Basa.
That’s not to suggest Telegration,
established all the way back in 1990,
has been content to rest on its laurels.
Basa assuming his role as president
marks his return to the master agency
after 12 years of serving in executive
roles at channel providers including
Nitel and BullsEye, and he certainly
can speak to the changes the industry
has undergone in that time.
“If you go back 12 years to 2005,
we didn’t even have an iPhone,” re-
calls Basa.
Back then, “telecom products” were
relatively few in number, were provid-
ed by a manageable number of voice
and data suppliers and generally were
purchased by telecom departments
within an organization. Today, the
number of products available to agents
has exploded, as has the rate of intro-
duction and adoption of new technolo-
gies. Likewise, says Basa, “In the last
decade, thousands of providers have
been added to the marketplace,” while
buying decisions today are largely
made by cross-functional groups.
In short, “the world is way more
complicated,” says Basa.
Now more than ever, it’s incumbent
upon master agents such as Telegra-
tion “to declutter the marketplace,”
he says, “to simplify the complexity to
achieve the best possible result for our
sales partners and end user clients.”
That requires a fair share of platforms
and capabilities. Top-selling agents, af-
ter all, want to spend their time selling,
not managing their accounts, trouble
tickets and commissions, says Basa.
“Let’s face it. If you’re busy selling
every day, you can’t be busy managing
all the other back office items, so our
platform really is a type of back office
as-a-service,” says Basa.
Since it also operates in the capac-
ity of a reseller, Telegration has made
the necessary investments in pro-
cesses and platforms, says Basa, from
billing and customer care to project
management and sales engineering to
auditing and automation. Basa sees
these capabilities as the pillars of be-
ing a top master agent, but believes
the real value is in the people on the
Telegration team.
“The best service quotes are not
necessarily fast, automated quotes from
a machine,” he says. “A good quote
comes from interacting with another
person, discussing a specialized busi-
ness application, and then using our
knowledge of the service providers and
technologies available to match that up
with our sales partner out in the field.”
Sales partners want to be able to
send an email and get back a response,
says Basa. They want to brainstorm
about a solution with a sales engineer,
create a Visio diagram and collaborate
with carrier partners and the Telegration
solution experts to create the best pos-
sible solution.
“We believe that resources are very
important, so we have made significant
investments in quoting, training and
project management tools. All of our
systems are very scalable and have
been built on
Salesforce.com,” Basa
continues, “but we’ve heard resonating
feedback from our top-performing sales
producers: they like the people more
than the systems.”
“Can people be a platform?” he asks.
In a world of artificial intelligence and
mega-merger master agencies, messag-
es that emphasize “quality over quan-
tity” and the power of a personal touch
may not be the sexiest sell, and they are
unlikely to attract the most attention. But
it’s the type of thinking that Telegration
believes sets it up as the best option for
the best-selling agents.
“Today’s marketplace is more chal-
lenging than ever,” says Basa, “and we
believe the key to a great partner ex-
perience is a combination of expertise,
speed and clarity.”
o
TheHighTouch
Technique
I
n an era of channel consolidation, when mergers and ac-
quisitions happen fast, it’s easy for even a casual observer
to assume that it’s time “to go big or go home.”
Telegration puts its stamp on
the master agent model
Channel
Vision
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July - August, 2017
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