At the same time Longbottom has taken the opportunity to completely re-fresh his management team.
“The four areas we have looked at are; commissions, partner contracts, portfolio access and our support package.
With regards to commissions we have increased payments for incremental business but are paying less on the defense of existing core business such as calls and lines. The vast majority of changes made are however beneficial to our partners and these came in to effect on 1 July. Significantly payments are now made up front to the partner instead of over 24 months. We considered that our commissions on ICT products were very robust and therefore we made no changes to sums payable for broadband.”
Longbottom says that he is re-signing partners on new two year contracts with an option for three year with some of their partners. Some partners will not be re-signed. Currently BT has 23 channel partners including the their five distributors, Nimans, Abtec, Gtech, 3P and DMSL.
“We have also completely opened up our entire product portfolio to our reseller partners and re-freshed our support proposition on technical and sales solution design support for partners. Because this channel review was conducted over a lengthy period we had held pack on new partner recruitment however we have now re-engaged are in recruitment mode.
We recently signed three new partners, including 4Com, and are talking to several others. BT has to get the right kind of partner for our brand and I can confirm that one or two existing partners will not be re-signed on our new contracts.”