Is the future channel team going to be employed by the vendor?

There is a pattern emerging. The remote working mentality has switched on which means that two things are occurring.

1. There are people juggling multiple jobs at different companies (We know of someone doing three!)

2. People are quitting working direct for employers and starting their own company

We conducted a survey of which the respondents were mainly people employed in the channel with the question:

Would you setup your own company and go it alone?

The results were pretty interesting.

There were four possible answers on the survey.

1. Yes

2. No

3. Already have

4. Show me the results

The biggest collection of people voted for “yes” with a 38% vote followed by “Already have” with 32% of the votes.

Only 18% of people in the survey had aspirations of staying working for an employer.

Could this mean that your team are looking to jump ship at the earliest opportunity?

The statistics from the UK government show that in 2021, it was a record year for the amount of companies formed in the UK. Most of these companies were sole director businesses for what I can assume are consultancy based businesses.

People are starting to work under their own brand and provide the services that they would to one employer to multiple employers at the same time.

Are your channel team considering doing the same?

It’s a low barrier to entry when it’s a pure services play and everyone is wanting to setup a channel.

The rapid expansion of fractional anything companies is evident by the amount of fractional services now available.

Fractional channel chiefs

It happens that weekly, we speak with someone who has setup shop as a channel consultant. They’ve worked for vendors, distributors and even resellers in some capacity and decided to go it alone.

The benefits to them offering their services at a fractional level far outweigh them working for the same employer directly.

Handling two vendors at the same time can be managed and can result in a more economical system for the vendor than employing directly.

Startup vendors who can’t necessarily afford to hire in a full time VP channel and channel team can now do this at a fraction of the cost whilst ramping up their channel program to be able to support the outlay for a full time channel team.

If you look at our previous article on the global salaries within the channel, you will see that it’s not the most economical option when starting out.

Having a fractional channel chief in place that you can switch on and off at a moments notice could be the answer.

The transition from sales led organisations to tech led organisations could be the catalyst in the outsourcing of all sales operations to fractional leaders or outsourced suppliers.

The vendor then needs to concentrate on the tech and everything surrounding this is provided by external companies.

The benefits of outsourced teams

In the UK, we can’t employ outside of the UK unless we spin an entity up in the country that we are employing in. Even if we want to employ someone within Europe, we wouldn’t be able to have them on the payroll.

Outsourcing or fractional services is a solid answer to this problem.

Being handled by a separate company altogether, the onus is on the outsourcing company or fractional individual to handle employment and tax under their umbrella.

Contracts can be flexible and don’t require the same red tape that is required for employing direct.

You can test the water before you jump in with both feet and spin up another entity or plan for an entire team.

Companies are complaining of struggling to find employees. It’s because everyone is deciding to go it alone. Nobody can find the right sales people. Using fractional services allows for the instant finding of people with backed up references and solid track records that are publicly available.

Conclusion

We at Channelyze are seeing more and more vendors outsourcing their channel teams as well as seeing channel employees jump ship and start their own service companies. The market is early in this space and there is plenty of room for channel consultants to come to the table and start to play.

With the amount of new companies starting up, the majority being tech companies, there are plenty of potential prospects that could utilise an outsourced channel team.

People are quickly starting to realise that what they do for an employer, they can do by themselves.

Entire teams at vendors are going to look vastly different to what they do today in ten years time with small service companies taking on the workload of the vendor when it comes to sales, marketing and business development which leaves the vendors to concentrate on the technology that they are building.

We at Channelyze don’t offer channel consultancy but maybe we should! The demand for it is that high that it could warrant a separate offering for early stage vendors who want to move into channel sales alongside the technology that we provide.