Intermedia boosts channel with better margins

As shown by the recent Parallels Summit in New Orleans, there is a general understanding amongst cloud service delivery businesses that the channel – in all its diversity – is an increasingly important tool in getting to reach end user businesses. So it is no surprise to see an increasingly diverse set of marketing tactics start to emerge to help generate their interest and support of the service delivery vendors.

One tactic is the use of margin, a venerable, revenue-based approach that has seen much service over the years across many types of business where the channel model has proved effective.

This approach is now being used by Intermedia, which claims to the world’s largest one-stop shop for cloud IT services and business applications, including hosted Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, Email Archiving and other services.

The company has a partner programme that allows MSPs and VARs to choose on a customer-by-customer basis between its Private Label model (a white label approach where the channel partner manages pricing, bundling billing, branding and every other aspect of the customer relationship) and its Advisor model (in which the partner or agent offloads support and billing to Intermedia).

Now, however, the Advisors group can earn 33 percent more monthly recurring revenue from every new customer account. Intermedia’s revised Advisor commission schedule for new customer accounts has increased from 6 percent to 8 percent commission on monthly recurring revenue for data services such as Exchange, Lync and SharePoint.

In addition, unlike many other providers, Intermedia’s Partner Programme guarantees commissions for the life of the account.

“We are committed to the success of our partners and our programme offers flexibility in the way partners can engage with us,” says Ed Macnair, managing director EMEA at Intermedia. “By offering industry-leading cloud services and by increasing the commissions for our advisor partners we are giving our partners a real edge in the market, which further underlines our commitment to expanding our EMEA business.”

While Intermedia’s Advisor programme provides partners or agents with very attractive commissions, its Private Label programme offers larger margins by allowing partners to own and manage more elements of their customer relationships. Private Label partners have the potential to achieve higher revenue and profit.

This because they can sell under their own brand, build custom bundles that seamlessly cross-sell and upsell their other services, integrate with their existing Salesforce and ConnectWise systems, streamline their internal processes by managing multiple customers and services via Intermedia’s Partner Portal, and rely on Intermedia for marketing support, sales enablement, onboarding and migration, and 24/7 phone and chat support.