Broadvoice CEO Jim Murphy and I have worked together a long time. Prior to Broadvoice, we both were involved with a consumer electronics accessories company. The business was extremely commoditized and challenging, but we overcame it by developing meaningful relationships with distributors and fully committing ourselves to their success. Our approach led to building a very strong distribution channel and creating one of the fastest growing private companies in the consumer electronics industry.

That early experience informs everything we do with our channel at Broadvoice. We’re not just “channel-friendly,” we’re relentless in our channel commitment. We understand that your success is our success.

Every employee who “touches” a partner or their customer strives to strengthen those relationships. Customer service reps, for example, don’t just take care of requests and technical issues; they’re passionate about our partners and their clients’ well-being and success. It’s not uncommon for our employees to make appointments with clients on nights and weekends when it’s more convenient for their IT staff to work through challenges or strategic initiatives.

A selfless state of mind

Why do they care so much they give up their personal time? It’s all about mindset. Here’s one of my favorite stories that shows what I mean:

When President John F. Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral to witness a rocket launch, it’s said that he greeted employees who were lined up and dressed in neatly-pressed white suits. He said to one, “Excuse me sir, what do you do here?” The employee replied, “I clean the toilets and the bathrooms for the facility.” When Kennedy questioned a second employee, who had the same exact job as the first, he answered, “I’m helping the U.S. get a man to the moon before the Russians!”

That’s a completely different way of thinking about your individual contribution to the success of the organization, and one I’m happy to say every single person at Broadvoice strives for. We are assembling a team that doesn’t just give lip service to partner support, but takes ownership of our company-wide directive to do what’s right for our partners and their customers to help them with their own “moon shot” — whatever it may be.

High-touch service even for small businesses

That goes double for small and medium businesses (SMBs). They’re posterchildren for job creation and innovation, but their small tech budgets often buy them little more than drop-shipped gear and a “cold shoulder” to cry on when it doesn’t work according to the cryptic instructions. Partners tell us the problem is both pervasive and challenging for them because they don’t have the time to constantly fill in the gaps when their service providers aren’t responsive and helpful to their clients.

This will never be the case at Broadvoice. We treat a 10-seat deal the same way we treat a 200-seat deal—with selflessness and the same level of professional onboarding, and access to company resources.

Are we interested in larger opportunities? Absolutely! That said, our primary focus is on serving SMBs with levels of support they deserve but rarely receive. It’s a proven differentiator for us—just ask our existing partners how different it is working with Broadvoice. It’s one of the reasons we are turning up so much business in the SMB market.

Technology that makes work easier

At the same time, we understand that no amount of handholding makes up for technology that doesn’t work or is difficult to use. So, making life easier for our partners and their customers is not only a directive for our employees, it’s an objective for our technology. We’ve just launched Broadvoice b-hive, a new UCaaS solution designed to make complex communications simpler for the 10-100 seat organization by combining the most-used functions on one platform, bundling connectivity, streamlining ordering/provisioning and offering intuitive user/admin control. Bundling SD-WAN also gives SMBs the quality of service (QoS) they need without more expensive MPLS and without having to go to another vendor.

A better partner experience

We’re making it as easy as possible for partners and their customers to do business with us in any way they please – high touch, self-service or a mix of both – so everyone in our orbit has an amazing experience.

To that end, we’ve expanded our partner support team with more regional channel managers and our solutions architects are available to host demos and engineer solutions for our partners’ clients.   Uniquely, we have partner sales managers who literally take care of quoting and ordering for our partners, so they can focus on sales.

Our partners are highly motivated to do just that.  We offer industry-leading partner compensation (really, we do!) that includes evergreen residuals, lucrative commissions, aggressive SPIFFs, and creative revenue opportunities such as installation markups, hardware markups and residuals on hardware rentals.

In the words of our partners…

Partners that work with Broadvoice tell us that, prior to working with us, they thought a value proposition like ours – high-touch support, effective solutions and also the strongest compensation in a single provider – was too good to be true. So don’t just take our word for it– take the word of our partners on what it’s like to work with our team:

Vanessa Carter, CEO of Broadvoice partner One View Communications, credits Broadvoice for helping her company achieve success:

“The team at Broadvoice really stepped up, proving over and over again they were as invested in the customer as we were. That is priceless, and it’s the foundation for what has evolved into a tremendous partnership. Broadvoice has become an indispensable part of our business model. The company’s people, platform, systems, customer service and support have impacted our success in a huge way.”

Vanessa’s not alone. Industry-leading master agency Sandler Partners, known as “America’s fastest growing distributor of connectivity and cloud services,” serves more than six thousand independent agents, VARs and MSPs nationwide. Here’s what founder and managing partner Alan Sandler has to say about Broadvoice:

“So many of our partners like and trust working with Broadvoice. They’ve helped them grow their businesses by expanding the services they can sell, the types of clients they can help and the level of customer care they can provide. Broadvoice is a true partner.”