New Verizon channel chief John Constantino said the organization he inherited from Mark Tina was already in solid shape, but he sees room for growth in a few areas.

Constantino, Verizon’s VP of business sales since 2023, took over as channel chief when Tina left Verizon in August. Moving into his new role, he said he quickly realized the Verizon channel has strong support from Verizon leadership.

“When I meet with the executive team, the excitement is always around what channel can do for them and how they enable channel,” Constantino said. “So inside [Verizon], we're in a pretty good spot. Where channel leaders, historically and across the industry, can go wrong is focusing only on partners and customers and not sharing what's happening within channel. I've spent a lot of time being very clear about where we are and, more importantly, what I think the growth paths are and what channel can deliver. That has generated a lot of excitement across the board.”

When pressed on what he would do different, Constantino had a short list.

“One thing is better enablement to scale and better enablement to make it easier for partners to do business with me, so they can work faster and achieve revenue quicker with us,” he said. “I mean the level of effort it takes for them to do business with us, whether in wireline, wireless or any other solutions. When I do that, there's also a big opportunity for partners to sell more of our product set, rather than being singularly focused on one or two products because those are the ones they're comfortable with or that are easier for us to do business on together.”

To make it easier for partners to do business with Verizon, Constantino said his team can do more to educate them.

“I look at this as all-in: partners have amazing customer engagements, so how do we maximize the benefit of those engagements and make sure customers are aware of the full suite of what Verizon can do?” he said. “I think that's a win-win. In places where we're not hitting that, some of it is self-inflicted, because we need to be easier to do business with. Others are about showing partners what the opportunity is and where they can make incremental revenue they may not even be aware of today.”

John Constantino

He said Verizon has product sets that it needs to make partners more aware of.

“There's an opportunity beyond mobility's core services,” Constantino said. “We have above-the-network solutions, such as security and some of our other SaaS offerings, that partners would have good opportunities to sell. I also think there's a tremendous opportunity for us collectively to go after some of the copper turndown in the wireless segment together, and we're actively working on that. As wireline revenue and legacy services are shut off, we think that's a massive opportunity for us to capture together.”

He said Verizon can tap into its partners’ expertise at selling solutions.

“I'm excited about the conversations around solution selling, being able to meet with a customer and architect the solution end to end,” he said. “We have a tremendous portfolio of partners who are amazing at that. How do I make it so they can capture the true opportunity with every customer engagement they have?”

What can Verizon do to make it easier for partners to do business with the carrier?

“Being able to integrate APIs better, and having visibility into where the opportunities really lie and where we want partners focused,” he said. “And compensation, of course. Anytime you engage with partners, there's going to be some debate and discussion around comp. By the way, I welcome that. The best comp plans I've ever built within the channel were built with agent and partner feedback. I want to know: if I do this, what does it unlock for you, and what can we do together if we change the way we do business? They've been good conversations, and I think they'll get more in depth as people get comfortable with me and realize that I really want the feedback and want them to hit me straight. But the partners have been pretty open so far.”

Constantino said his experience working on the direct side with Verizon can help him work with partners better.

“You have to remove friction,” he said. “You have to have Verizon Business leaders believe the channel is part of their distribution. That's where we've done a ton of work, and I'll continue to unlock it and show the value of channel. Second, you have to make it easy to transact with us, and we have a varied answer to that. In certain parts of my business, partners have seamless transactions and seamless onboarding of customers, and it's very smooth. In other places within mobility, we still have work to do to make transactions easier, so partners are motivated to explore them and see that they're profitable. It should be something they can do in the course of other work with customers, not a burden.”

He said Verizon can also use AI to improve partner support.

“My team has gotten really solid feedback on how we support, but how do we support better by leveraging AI and some of the tech tools?” he said. “To me it comes down to customer experience and partner experience. If we nail those two things, we can scale at a faster rate, because we make doing business with Verizon even easier.”

He also wants to “keep in lockstep” with technology services distributors (TSDs) that work with tech advisors.

“I think they're a tremendous value, starting with the reach,” Constantino said. “They give us access to partner communities that it would be impossible for me to get into on my own. They also do a ton of support and marketing work to make our partners successful. My team's job is to be in lockstep with them: how do we enable them to enable our partners, get their feedback, and make sure we're all on the same page about what we want to accomplish together? They're a critical part for me.”