New Alliances Reinvent Wireless for Channel

Lightyear Offers Agents Residuals on Verizon Wholesale Mobility

Lightyear’s new wireless contract fills a gap the reseller has bemoaned for years. “For six years we have been on the hunt,” said Ray. He noted Lightyear has tried to offer wireless in the past as early as 1996 and as recently as 2002, each time as an agent. Lightyear also investigated becoming a direct Verizon Wireless reseller, but predictably volume commitments were among the obstacles.

Lightyear’s channel partners also have been asking the company for wireless products almost as long. Many agents have experienced challenges working as direct agents for wireless carriers and have been asking Lightyear to make it easier for them to add mobility. What’s more they are looking for a compensation plan that’s comparable to what agents are used to earning on wireline services as opposed to the typical activation commission or activation commission plus single-digit MRC percentage.

Lightyear agent Stu Johnson, director of sales with [National Energy Services Company Inc. (NESC), Egg Harbor, N.J., said his company was dragged kicking and screaming into the wireless business because of customer demand. NESC provides utility management services, including energy and telecom, to multilocation and multinational companies. About 18 months ago it signed a direct agency deal with Sprint and found it to be a full-time job to manage the plans and the phones. Making matters more complex, he claimed Sprint isn’t set up to process business-to-business accounts, particularly multilocation deals. He said, for example, he can’t order phones with numbers matching the user’s location and his Sprint agent support team is only incented to work on activations in their local areas, so he and his out-of-area customers have no support.

In contrast, he said Lightyear is an agent-based company. “They understand agents like me. They understand the support that I need. They understand my business model,” Johnson said, noting he has sold Lightyear’s services for two years. “I’m not saying it’s going to be perfect because wireless is a tough game, but when I call with a situation — whether it’s pre-sale order issue or a post-sale customer service issue — they understand my model.”

Lightyear agent Pete Langas, president of IPiphany, Rolling Meadows, Ill., also feels pressure to offer its business customers wireless service. “We like to work with our clients for whatever their communications needs are; the gap for us has always been the wireless side of things,” he said. “We’ve been in business seven years and we’ve been looking for it almost from the get-go.”

IPiphany offers managed voice and data services to SMBs. “Because we handle so much of their other communications, they’d like to consolidate the number of vendors they have to deal with. At times it’s also a service issue particularly among the smaller clients or the clients who are spread across multiple locations.”

As an MSP, IPiphany plans to build on the Lightyear Wireless services with additional services like calling plan optimization and expense/asset management.

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