Channel leaders have aligned sales teams with partner-first strategies. In-house management teams have been harder to rein in.
IT and telecom vendors are adding customers through partner relationships, but keeping them isn’t assured. Channel partners are evaluating renewal strategies, as vendors cut customer support staff. In the agency sales model, which gives the vendor account ownership while technology advisors add logos, it’s a balancing act.
“The channel harmony is being spoken, but it’s also not being acted upon. In my experience, we’ve had more conflict with direct teams in the last six months than probably the prior six years,” Eclipse CEO Dave Dyson told Channel Dive.
For Dyson, channel conflict reflects broader headwinds in enterprise sales. Buying committees are growing larger and moving more slowly — sales cycles are taking 40% to 50% longer according to Eclipse’s data. Dyson said vendor sales teams become more aggressive during economic downturns, reaching out to customers behind partners’ backs to renew deals without the agent attached to the deal.
“We’ve seen multiple [vendors] with aggressive/interesting renewal processes that seem designed to pressure the customer to sign without evaluating their needs or the market, cut the TA out of the renewal completely, and/or give customer contract information to another [solution provider] to prospect based on the renewal,” ITBroker.com CEO Max Clark told Channel Dive in a message.
In other cases, vendors can’t hand deals over to TAs fast enough. Many providers have proactively reached out to IT service provider Top Speed Data Communications with opportunities for co-selling, Network Design Consultant Allan Jaffe said.
Telecom carriers use indirect sales to optimize budgets.
AT&T has notably reduced its direct salesforce and redirected accounts to trusted partners. Some of the largest communications providers are also bringing in partners, especially those who offer professional services.
However, cutting sales staff often curtails support personnel.
“More and more I'm seeing that organizations are relying so heavily on reducing costs in areas that are not revenue-generating that one of those first areas that gets hit is the support,” TitanNGN VP of Channel Sales Forrest Knueppel said.
A 2025 Informa TechTarget survey of 59 TAs found that the most common reason their customers switched vendors was poor support. That’s why fast-growing vendors churn customers, Knueppel said. Those companies don’t add enough support to match the customer growth.
Moreover, Kneuppel said, it’s easier than ever for clients to get a divorce.
“In the early 2000s if you wanted to break a telco contract, it was pretty readily understood that collections was going to come after you for the remainder of that contract,” Knueppel said. “It's become less so in my experience that people are putting that kind of emphasis on going after people for that contract.”
TAs are exploring the opportunities to expand co-selling with the big carriers, but they acknowledge that a bad customer experience with a vendor could damage their reputation.
“Anyone who trusts a big telecom is a f*cking idiot,” Disruptive Innovations CEO David Wright said.
Contact center AI can help vendors resolve support tickets and save staffing costs. The tactic could also backfire, as customers demand to talk to a human, and the remaining staffers are asked to do more.
“Companies are going to have to find that strategic balance between minimizing the number of tickets that are being handled by their live people, but still having the live people,” Knueppel said.
Longtime channel chief Jim Glackin finally has his hands on account management as CRO at Coeo Solutions.
Account managers generally don’t typically report to a channel leader, even when a customer account originates with a partner. As a result, account management processes and policies aren’t always partner-aligned.
“I'm not saying they were competing against the partner, but they were operating without the partner,” Glackin said.
One of Glackin’s first orders of business at Coeo was to mandate that account managers keep the partner looped in on customer communications.
“It's really proactively setting up an engagement expectation with the partner up front. How do you want to be engaged? Some partners are like, ‘Do your thing.’ Other partners are like, ‘No, we want to be involved in absolutely everything. We want everything to go through us. We want all communication.’ And we'll do it that way.”
