Verizon Business has consolidated all its channel operations into one organization led by Mark Tina, Channel Chief and VP of Channel for Verizon Business. Tina heads a 700-person organization that reports directly to Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady.

Tina’s organization now covers all of Verizon’s business segments, such as global enterprise, public sector, SMB, and mid-market. That puts him in position to take feedback from channel partners and relay that to Verizon Business’ product teams and other teams inside the company to ensure both sides get what they need. The goal is to streamline operations, improve partner experience, and enhance indirect distribution.

“It just shows Verizon's investment in indirect distribution that we have finally made this decision,” Tina said. “Indirect now has a seat in the C-Suite. We are considered for all decisions being made.”

This should be good news for the technical advisors (TAs) and agents who have found Verizon challenging to work with at times.

This is a time of change at Verizon. The telco has a new CEO, Dan Schulman, and recently said it would lay off around 13,000 employees.

Tina, a member of the 2025 Channel Partners Circle of Excellence class, said the new structure is a result of many great minds coming together to unify the channel unit after the 23-year Verizon veteran became Channel Chief and VP of Indirect and Partner Sales in 2023.

“As the channel has evolved over the years, our goal at Verizon has always been to provide a seamless experience," he said. "We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work, and we’ve put a lot of effort into creating one cohesive channel team. We have also worked with a lot of third-party consultants and done a lot of internal research to figure out what should this really look like. This is what we’ve finally launched, with our channel now reporting directly into the Verizon Business CEO. Now it is one centralized channel unit.”

Having a unified channel organization gives Tina’s organization a “a lot more mind share” inside Verizon, Tina said.

“Unless indirect and the channel is front and center, it's often an afterthought, unfortunately,” he said. “So this will be a huge help when we think about things like product and marketing, and finance.”

While Tina says Verizon is doing its best to work better with partners, he also has advice for partners who want to improve their relationship.

“My advice is: Be honest and transparent, but also realistic. Let’s work together to find solutions that benefit both sides,” he said. “Give us real feedback. Most partners already do, but if we’re not having honest, transparent conversations, we’re wasting each other’s time. I’ve met partners who say everything is great, but they’re not growing with us—so there’s clearly a problem. This has to be a partnership where both sides win.”

He said the relationship between Verizon and partners is a two-way street.

“It's us coming to partners to see what they have available, and then partners coming to us on the other end of it, saying, ‘Are you interested in this?’ And I think there's going to be a lot of growth coming through that,” he said. “As Verizon sees a need in the market based on a total addressable market, let's go out to the channel partners to say, ‘what can you do now?’ The other side of the two-way street is outward-in. As the partners have awesome, creative solutions that we may not have thought of, and they bring it to us, Verizon will now be much more prone to say, ‘hey, that's a great idea. Should we white label that?’ I think what we're looking for here is really, how do we identify what the best-in-class solutions are, so that we can partner and win.”