In his blog yesterday, Brian Riggs gave an up-to-the-minute review of the executive appointments that have been made over the last few months at Avaya. One such change was the appointment of Todd Abbott as Senior Vice President of Global Sales. Brian mentioned that Abbott plans to increase the percentage of sales driven by channel partners, with a target of 85 percent by 2011. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Abbott and explore the tactics he intends to employ to get there. I was left with the impression that unlike many such promises made by vendors over the years, for Abbott falling short of the mark is not an option.
During his formal plenary session at the analyst meeting, Abbott talked about targeting a finite set of global carriers (the usual suspects: AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, etc.) as Avaya channel partners. When we met, I asked why he thought carriers would be more interested in selling Avaya solutions now than they had been in the past, and even if they were, how he would get mind share with the many competing product lines already in most carriers' bag of tricks.
The answer brings us back to the title of this piece: high touch–channel centric. In the past, carriers reselling Avaya had to worry about Avaya's direct sales force competing with them head-to-head for the same deal. There was a reluctance to spend the time and effort to bid Avaya only to end up losing the deal to the vendor.
Abbott has replaced "direct" with "high touch" sales coverage. What I took this to mean is the "care and feeding" that clients are used to won’t change, but fulfillment of an order will increasingly move from Avaya to channel partners. A commenter on Brian’s blog wrote, "85% indirect sales by 2011 points to a lot of good Avaya sales people either transitioning to the channel or walking the streets." In fact, Abbott said nothing about decreasing the size of his sales force. Instead, he talked about leveraging the people he has to assist channel sales people in selling Avaya solutions.
While Abbott may not have plans to change the size of the sales force, he will make sure that people that aren't making the grade get cut. That's a competitive caution: if you see an Avaya sales person looking for a job, it won't be because the job is gone but because he/she didn't survive Abbott's take-no-prisoners sales management regime.
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