Bigleaf Loves the Channel
When Joel first approached me about his Bigleaf concept, one of the first things that came to my mind was the channel. It seemed like such an obvious fit. The channel would be more aware of the potential in a solution like Bigleaf, as well as the demand from customers looking to build redundancy into their networks.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best people in the telecom channel. I had seen how they have leveraged the freedom and choice that channel has to build value for their customers and success for their businesses. I knew that if we built Bigleaf with the channel in mind, these same people could leverage Bigleaf with similar success.
The channel creates a unique value for a startup like Bigleaf. Whereas an established carrier may only look at the channel as a “cheaper” way to sell its products, the channel creates foundational value for us. The channel is a more than just a sales tool, it’s a sales, marketing, and customer success foundation.
As a startup, our early challenges lie in market awareness and customer reach. Who better to see the value that Bigleaf creates, including reliability, performance, and independence, then the channel? Furthermore, who better to tell our story than the best salespeople in the telecom industry? Members of the channel are the experts that our potential customers look to when they need a solution their problems.
Furthermore, the channel creates unique synergies between Bigleaf and other providers that would take us years to do on our own. While I spend months talking other service providers (VoIP, SaaS, Cloud, or Internet), trying to convince them that working with us will create mutual value. A single agent can prove that value by selling Bigleaf alongside these provider’s services. In many ways, the channel legitimizes our value.
The Channel will Love Bigleaf
Likewise, we believe that we provide a great deal of value to the channel too. We don’t see this as a one-sided relationship. We are an important addition to the portfolio of every agent in the market.
The telecom market is getting tougher and tougher for agents each day. Price compression and commoditization of traditional Internet services have forced many agents to look beyond traditional telecom to grow their business. Fortunately, SaaS and the Cloud create a whole new avenue for longevity and success in the channel. However, this untapped growth and success is heavily dependent on those same Internet circuits that are getting cheaper and in many instances less reliable.
This is where Bigleaf creates value for our channel partners. Bigleaf not only addresses technical problems created by unreliable Internet solutions, we solve real business problems for today’s agent.
First off, Bigleaf creates the need for at least one additional Internet circuit for every customer – leading to increased revenue. Secondly, with Bigleaf in place, these same customers are insulated from performance-based issues and outages on their Internet circuits – limiting customer support. Finally, with Bigleaf’s traffic optimization tools, like Same IP Failover, Application-Aware Load-Balancing, and Dynamic QoS, each customer has the optimal environment to deploy cloud-based services.
Bigleaf is committed to build and grow with our channel partners. It’s exciting to be in the front row for some of the most interesting evolutions in telecom and tech industries. It’ll be even better to have our friends in the channel sitting next to us.
