Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Ty Smith - Driving Diversity in the Channel
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we dive into the career journey and channel philosophy of Ty Smith, founder of Optical Diversity Telecom and 2023 Channel Manager of the Year at Intellisys. From redefining what it means to be a proactive channel leader to launching his own agency, Ty brings unmatched insights from the trenches of indirect sales and partner enablement.
We unpack Ty’s award-winning approach to distributor collaboration, technical training, and network-first channel growth. He also introduces his thought-provoking SPICE framework, an actionable model for driving diversity across Suppliers, Partners, Investors, Customers, and Employees and explains why a more inclusive channel isn’t just fair, it’s essential for scale.
You’ll also hear:
- What most channel managers misunderstand about switching to the partner side
- Why brand equity matters more than ever, and how new partners can build it
- How to bring the channel to overlooked regions and underrepresented talent pools
- Ty’s bold vision to make channel roles as mainstream as real estate agents
Whether you're leading partner strategy or just discovering the power of the channel, this episode offers a fresh, human, and forward-thinking lens on what’s next for our ecosystem.
Connect with Ty: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyrellsmith/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest Ty. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Hey, appreciate you having me on. Yeah, thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're excited to have you on. I've got a weird running joke on this podcast that, born in distribution seems to lead to great careers, and we have somehow worked for the same company by proxy. I'm at ScanSource, you're at X Intellisys, and those two worlds obviously came together. One of the places maybe you can start us with is a little bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do, and then we can discuss some of that history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, definitely. So my name is Ty Smith. I run a firm called Optical Diversity Telecom. So we are based in Las Vegas and we essentially focus on telecommunications and cloud services all across the USA. Our major play is really working with new developers and really getting into some of those new builds all around Las Vegas and beyond. And then, for my background, I've been in the indirect space for about eight years total. So I did vendor management for four years on the residential end and then channel management for Cox Business and RapidScale for four years as well. So, yeah, just super happy to be on here, happy to talk about channel. It's just a topic that is always fun to talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were named Channel Manager of the Year by Intellisys in 23. One congratulations. Two, what are some of the key strategies that allows you to work with the great distributor that, or the great TSD that Intellisys is? How did you win that award?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I actually won that. As a Cox business channel manager I was up against quite a few channel managers I think it was somewhere close to like a thousand across the USA and I think the main thing that I think I was doing different is, you know, generally right now there's a you know you're kind of told as a channel manager to just kind of wait for your alliance managers to really bring you into relationships with the TSDs and to just kind of like play your part. Let them play your part. But I think for me I just want to be a little more proactive and really just want to understand the whole channel ecosystem as a whole and really understand who my distributor partners are and really what they need, because their quotas and their KPIs are changing constantly. So the main thing that I think I did differently was really helping them with recruiting.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of different events that I was going to within the channel and then just sometimes outside the channel where I would meet different potential partners and, even though many of these may not have benefited myself personally, I knew that there was a channel manager, maybe in another region, for a distributor that should be able to onboard this person and really help this person get into the channel. There was also other things that I did when it came to training. I was very open to really step in and learn my product on a very technical level and really kind of play that engineering role and do some of these more technical presentations which really took a lot of the load off of the distributor just in general. So these are things that you know supplier channel managers can actually do that really impact your actual distributors, and I think that was primarily the reason why awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think going the extra mile goes a long way, and I think all walks of life. But in the channel, because of the sort of reciprocity and because of the way your network continues to build and build and build, you've gone the extra mile there. It's obviously nice to get an award, but I imagine your network and your business and the relationships that you can now rely on has also grown from strength to strength.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. I mean the thing about the channel is such a small world so you know, oftentimes you might do something that it may not affect you right now, it may not affect your current business or your current metrics, but you're going to see the same people, different titles. You know different years, different companies. So people remember those little things that you may have done that was kind of outside of your norm and outside of your scope, and I always try to remember that you know have done that was kind of outside of your norm and outside of your scope and I always try to remember that. You know, because channel is a lifestyle for many people. You know you might come and go, you might flip from the partner side to the supplier side, to the distributor side and then back and forth, but generally people largely stay within this partnership ecosystem. So I think it's just important to largely help everyone, even if it doesn't always benefit you personally.
Speaker 1:Awesome largely help everyone, even if it doesn't always benefit you personally. Awesome, maybe pivoting then to when you started your agency in 2024, that's a big step to take. What are some of the biggest sort of challenges or lessons that you found, you know, during that transition from being a channel manager to really running your own business in the channel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so I think you know, for for channel managers I mean, there's always this kind of misconception that, hey, you know, if there's a customer in front of me, I could get this customer to purchase services, and that is that is true.
Speaker 2:But when you're now on the other side and you're a partner, now you have to actually get that customer, so you have to go out and do the prospecting. But then there's this other school of thought where, hey, well, if I go out and prospect and I get my cadences right and I go and make cold calls, and I can go and just land a customer and build a relationship and get that deal. But I think what people forget is some of the levels of relationships that you're up against when you're a partner. You're up against levels of relationships that sometimes date back 10 years, 15 years. You're up against people that might live in neighborhoods with three or four CTOs of major companies and their families know each other. There's personal networks that they've had. There's college relationships. People might have went to school with people that ventured off and became CIOs or CTOs. And so I think there's a naivety sometimes where we just believe, hey, I know how to sell, I know how to prospect, but there's some built-in relationships that sometimes you need to have that other people do yeah.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that people often forget is the power of brand right. And I don't mean personal brand, I mean the brand you're selling. I know there was a moment I was running a zoom distribution strategy for amia that there was almost anyone because it was in covid that I could get a meeting with right. I really could you know email, basically anyone say hey, I need 20 minutes, can we sit down? And they'd be like yep 100. I am desperate to talk to zoom, to understand what's going on and how we can partner and all of those stuff, those same stakeholders. 15 later, when I'm now selling into those big manufacturers, suddenly getting those meetings was a lot, lot harder.
Speaker 2:That brand equity goes a long way and sometimes it can be a bit of a shock to the system that when you don't have that brand supporting you, yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that, and I think that it also comes to you know, working with the right suppliers that really help with that, because there's certain suppliers that will say you know what, we'll come with you, we'll come with you to this networking event, we'll come with you to your personal events that you throw, we'll fund them, we'll be in the room and we'll give you some of that, and not all suppliers will do that. So I think when you jump out, you quickly have to learn who does that until you get, like you said, that rent equity where you don't necessarily need that anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. So you have an interesting spin on Spice which frames your Spice framework around diversity in the channel across suppliers, partners and customers. Can you elaborate on the practical steps vendors and distributors can take to embrace that framework and why it's so important for channel growth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely so, spice, just to give you the acronym. So we're basically talking about just having just a diverse array of S for suppliers. We got P for partners, I for investors in the channel, we have C for customers and then E for our employees. So when we're looking at it and we're breaking down each steps on the supplier side, I think we're at an interesting point right now where we have, you know, a lot of AI companies that are coming in. But these AI companies oftentimes they're not always just coming through Silicon Valley. They may not, you know, be coming through a spinoff of a major provider or telecom. They're coming through very diverse places sometimes, often globally, in places that we won't expect.
Speaker 2:And I think, now more than ever, that everybody has access to these tools. There's no limitations on what you can actually build on your own, especially when we have things like software development that can now be done through an actual GPT chat box. There are people in very untapped areas that are developing these AI tools, these conversational AI calling platforms, that know nothing about the channel. And if these products were in the channel and if they had some guidance on how to structure their business so that the product is channel friendly. You know we can have a decent amount of suppliers that can really help. You know some, some of our existing partners, you know, double back to their, to their customers, and find more great tools to offer, because a lot of the these different suppliers, they're just going at it from a direct sales approach because they've never encountered anyone in the channel that can say, hey, this is how partnerships, you know, strategy works, so so, so I think that that's one piece of it is is looking at it from from a supplier perspective, on the investor side, that well, on the partner side, um, there's, there's a whole thing right there when it comes to just having partners that can sell in different untapped markets.
Speaker 2:You know, when we look at, we look at certain areas and maybe we have situations where we have communities that might be, you know, bilingual. I mean there are certain partners that can navigate in certain spaces that you know might have different cultural sensitivities and that could be on all levels. I mean we could be talking about, you know, language, we could talk about religious norms, and I think that if we're shopping in the same places for partners all the time, we may not be able to actually pull out some of the businesses and the business owners that are very diverse, especially when we're looking at retail chains in America and we look at who owns many of these 30, 40, 50 location chains. It's a diverse group and I think we have to have a partner community that can actually match that. But these partners have to know the channel exists. We have to be able to go into different universities. There's universities that are more geared to certain diverse groups or religious groups or whichever, and I think that when it comes to enabling the channel, we have to do it from an earlier point. It can't just be something that we just learn, just happenstance, when we're working in direct sales and we discover the channel exists. We have to bring that back into some of our public schools, some of our colleges, and I think that that's one way where we can now blanket this knowledge across a large, diverse base by standardizing some of that knowledge into our school systems.
Speaker 2:On the I side, with investors, there's so many different, just diverse, just fund managers that are out there and we have partners that need funding. There's a need for VC funding in the channel because this is a very scalable business. It's a simplistic business model when we look at residual percentages and when we look at cost for ads, it follows a lot of the similar norms of very successful businesses today, but we have to be tapping into two different types of funds, different types of funds. I mean there's a stat that you know since 2020, there's been $127 billion that have been raised by diverse fund managers and that $127 billion is a lot of money and you know what percentage of that is going into the channel. That's something that we need to actually look at and we need to look at how can we get more of that into the channel, because I've talked to some of these fund managers and they've said I wish I knew the channel existed, because I'm spending a lot of my investor dollars on candle companies or I'm spending it on just different consumer brands and the channel would probably make more sense if I had a better understanding of it. And then also we're getting it into customers. I mean that goes back with the partners. When you have the diverse partners to tap into some of those customers, where you're going to find these customers really is really chambers. So in the US we have different business chambers that focus on diversity groups and I think if we now have some channel representation, channel knowledge in each one of these chambers and chambers. Understand that that channel is a revenue source, potentially also for the chamber as well. There's different streams that you can build there. That's one way where you can tap into businesses.
Speaker 2:Don't realize that there are partners out there that aren't doing business with certain suppliers because of sometimes bad experiences that they had. I mean to give you a very short one. I mean this is you know within a few topic about, you know 18th century. You know just a cotton farming, you know, and me as an African-American, obviously it was a very bizarre topic to bring up in a meeting with a partner that is looking to sell your products and service, but the topic was just something that was a little insensitive for myself and obviously that's one supplier that I won't be working with. Luckily there's hundreds of suppliers, but that's not a one-off situation. That happens quite a bit and I think it's really having the actual just diverse group of employees where that knowledge can be mind shared inside that company of what cultural norms just to be careful of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we talk a lot on this podcast about building from the customer backwards.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, we're all here to service end users and whether we do that indirectly via distribution, whether we're an MSP, we all have the same goal, which is make a lot of money servicing and delivering value to that end customer.
Speaker 1:The thing I really like in terms of your SPICE framework is matching the partner demographic to the customer demographics really, really important. If you only pull partners from Northern Minnesota, guess where you're going to get end users. They're only going to be there right, and so making sure that you've got the knowledge and the infrastructure to be able to go through that partner acquisition and enablement, motion in all the areas and segmentation that you need. That's what ultimately gives you that hyperscale right, and that hyperscale is why you build a channel and don't build a direct team, is because you want to extend further than your own reach, and I think that framework really highlights the the importance there. I think one of the things from an opportunities perspective, you've taught me around how certain regions are really trailblazing and others maybe are falling behind. That doesn't mean that you give up on the regions that are falling behind. There's an education and an enablement motion. How can disties and vendors better engage and support underrepresented areas like, I don't know, Atlanta?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so, so, so, yeah. I definitely believe there's there's plenty of of of untapped markets, and I think we can just start looking at really just sales organizations and tech organizations, and I, you know, when we look at some of like the largest and fastest growing conferences just in the USA as a whole, a few of these actually tend to be diversity-based conferences. We can take an example of a conference called Afrotech, which, year over year, was doubling to now it's the point of 40 plus thousand people are expecting to be at the conferences here. Thousand people are expecting to be at the conferences here, and, and you know when, when we have all of these people there and you think about all the different companies that are there from from you know anything from from Google to open AI, to to to Cisco and et cetera, et cetera, the, the.
Speaker 2:The one topic that often isn't covered is channel, and you know we have people that are going to go to these conferences and be very influenced of. You know what career path should I choose? You know, based on what I see in this conference, I'm really going to shop my life and my career path based on what I see, and if channel isn't there and isn't on that stage or isn't in that, that, that expo floor, you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people going into other roles, whether that's software engineering, whether that's maybe going into direct sales, because that's what they're hearing. They're hearing about SDR and BDR and many of those terms are viral right now on the internet and YouTube. There's many courses about those, but I think it's really up to us as a channel, to start to show up in these spaces that we haven't quite showed up before and to really and to, and and to really. You know, step in, meet some, some of these conference owners.
Speaker 2:You know, if we look at at Atlanta, for example, there's, there's just amazing organizations out there.
Speaker 2:You know, when you look at at organizations like, like RenderATL, when you look at what happens with Atlanta Tech Week every year and some of the other tech weeks as well, you know, there, there's, there, there's a lot of amazing things in New Jersey Tech Week and New York Tech Week, and you look at Diversitech, and then you look at the organizations that I think are just a shoo-in, where they're just about sales.
Speaker 2:National Sales Network is a massive organization that is just about sales Sisters in Sales. Their whole thing is about sales, but in terms of channel content, you could have events with thousands of people and not a single person will be on stage, you know, talking about the channel, and you could have entire rooms that people don't know about the channel, and I think that that's a major loss, because these are talented people, these are the people that you want as your channel managers, and I think, ultimately, what will end up happening is now we will have a continuous pool. Oh, we have now channel managers that might be jumping from job to job to job to job, but there's very little competition now because we don't have this continuous influx of high talent coming in. That's keeping current channel managers on their game, but also keeping the channel innovated. So I think that's really the things that we can look at from just an easy win perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's so important that we sort of build for what we want to happen right, and so we want to be not just bringing in a volume of talent but bringing the best talent, because I often sometimes think that, well, there's only X amount of roles in the channel. Right, it's great if everyone starts looking, but it means, as businesses, we can start to hire better than we were planning to right, and so if the pool gets bigger, it means the top 1% gets better and we can continue to hunt and drive for the best people within the channel and hopefully therefore convince the market that indirect is far better than direct. You've spoken at a lot of events and led some of these really powerful initiatives. Looking ahead, what sort of legacy do you hope to leave in the channel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my ultimate legacy is really just to make the channel just as popular as real estate, because the way that I see it is, you know we, we have real estate agents, we have insurance agents. You could ask almost anybody in America. You could ask almost anybody you know almost globally or or or at least in the Western world. You know about those roles and people are very familiar with that. But then the moment that you mentioned a technology agent or technology advisor, which is a very similar business model to an insurance agent, people don't know what that is and I think that you know.
Speaker 2:For me, my main legacy is I want to essentially just be the person that brings that conversation to light, of creating.
Speaker 2:You know just people that are very interested in just bringing channel to all spaces and not just at certain ages. I think it's something that we need to teach people from young. I think we need to bring it into educational systems that we have. I think we need more localized community groups in different communities where you can learn about channel, because in almost any community I can find, you know, in any city, suburb, town I can find an office about real estate and learn about real estate locally. There's no place to do that in the channel and we have a ton of different you know partners that are all over the USA. I mean, there was an estimate of 60,000 different IT partners in the USA just alone, so we have the amount of folks to actually get this done. It's just that I think we just really need to be intentional about making sure that we educate everyone from young and we make it just as popular as insurance and real estate.
Speaker 1:Love it Ty. Well, part of being a channel agent is you also have to be a Partnerships Unraveled agent, which means we ask you for a referral Ty. We want to ask you who do you think we should have on next?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would highly recommend having Jen Waltz on the channel. She has just a wealth of knowledge and some of the things that she's done just with CRN and Women in the Channel I think is just amazing. So that would be my main recommendation.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Jen, we're coming for you. Ty. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot. I really appreciate you having me on here.