AVANT Woos Trusted Advisors
The new edition of its Pathfinder platform aims to attract, retain, and enable MSPs, telco agents, and others who specialize in cutting through the noise of complex solutions.
People have been predicting the eventual convergence of the telco and IT channels for a long time. AVANT has been putting its own spin on the topic for a while. A long-time communications, contact center, and connectivity distributor that later added cloud and security solutions too, the company has built its entire channel strategy around the “trusted advisor,” a familiar term with a new meaning and added relevance, AVANT believes, in a time of increasingly powerful and increasingly complicated solutions.
“The role of the trusted advisor has become a consultant, it’s become a confidante, it’s become a business advisor,” says Chris Werpy, the company’s CTO. “It’s not just, ‘give me a quote and give me a cheap price.’ These technologies and solutions are so complex that it takes someone to help them navigate that just vast sea of vendors.”
AVANT has some 400 vendors on its line card, in fact, and more coming in AI alone every week. “There’s no way the IT buyer or the CISO or the CIO can keep up with all the options that are available to them,” Werpy says, noting that a trusted advisor can help them “cut through that noise.”
Most TAs, as AVANT often calls them, are one-time telco partners, he adds, but not all of them. “We’re starting to see more and more MSPs enter the space and grow the residual side of their business,” Werpy says.
Updates that began arriving in Pathfinder, AVANT’s TA portal, last week are a big part of the company’s strategy for attracting more MSPs and other channel partners. Originally, Werpy notes, the system was largely a sales enablement tool for telco agents.
“It became a conduit, a connection point between AVANT and all of our trusted advisors, and VARs, and national partners, and it just continued to evolve with things that we can do to help them scale their business,” he says.
The new edition of Pathfinder that AVANT has been developing for over a year is designed to accelerate that process, beginning with the introduction of a new commissions feature. While earlier commission tools shared numbers with partners once a month, according to Werpy, the new one lets them analyze up-to-the-minute figures any time they want.
“As opposed to just dumping a raw data file, this is really giving them business intelligence,” he says.
There’s more BI functionality, based on real-time data from vendors on AVANT’s line card, coming in the second half of the year, according to Michael Messagie, the company’s vice president of information technology.
“They’re ready with their APIs today,” he says. “We just need to connect with them and then we can provide their data to the TAs even faster with less back office costs for us.”
Functionality aimed at enabling TAs to share some of that data when meeting with clients is in development too, adds Jake Schuman (pictured), the AVANT VP in charge of Pathfinder.
“All of this IP that’s coming together then becomes their platform that they can use in front of customers to go and appear bigger, sell more complex deals, cross-sell, upsell on their base, and go drive more revenue,” he says.
Features like that directly reflect input from TAs, Schuman adds. “All of this is done intentionally for the trusted advisors based on what they’re asking us and what they need in their own business.”
Enough reading
How about some listening, like to the interview with NinjaOne’s VP of product strategy on this episode of the podcast I co-host? Just as informative. Far less work.
