Comms service provider Plan has unveiled an ambitious strategy to ramp up profits for its mobile reseller partners by adding a complete range of comms solutions to its portfolio.
The additions include fixed line voice and data connectivity through BT along with the full suite of Microsoft communications apps and software.
The strategy is pinned on a total overhaul of the Plan partner portal and seven new 'channels' which were revealed to an enthusiastic audience of 350-plus partners at the Plan.Live partner event at Manchester's Media City on March 19th.
In what will be seen as a major challenge to full service channel competitors, the new Plan offerings include fixed line, data and VoIP services, a complete hardware ordering mechanism with free delivery plus mobile broadband, IoT (Internet of Things) and a suite of Microsoft apps and software with a promise to pay 'the best commission' in the UK on Microsoft 365 deals.
Confessing to '30 sleepless nights' preparing for the launch, Plan CEO Dan Craddock said the company had a big war chest to call on plus the skill sets and passion to fund the ambitious rollouts and urged partners to work with him and his team on changing comms provider paradigms.
"We run lots of successful companies around the world and have a massive infrastructure at our disposal, and we want to share our vision for the future with our partners because we could not have achieved success so rapidly without them."
At the core of Plan's channel strategy is Version 3 of Plan Portal which has undergone a 'top to tail' revamp at the front and back-end and aims to offer partners what Operations Director Ched Willard described as 'a seamless user experience with maximum usability, flexibility and performance'.
He said: "The Portal is the tool that connects us together. It has been remodelled over thousands of man hours to give partners full control. The key is customisation and a completely new dashboard experience that users can organise in a way that suits their business."
Plan demonstrated its resolve to cater for the growing demands of partners and the entire business communications needs of the organisations they serve by announcing a range of valued added services all designed to add margin and glue in dealer/customer relationships.
These include a Recycling channel for partners to cash-in on end of life smartphones; a Mend channel offering a 72 hour quick fix repairs service for the 35 out of 100 users who manage to 'break' or 'drown' their devices; and a Wallet back-end to the Plan Portal enabling partners to stack up as many channels as they like and administer all customer services.
A mobile version of the portal is also being rolled out to enable partners to react 24-7 to business customer demands (for example, weekend broadband barring, data expenditure etc).
Plan also pledged to introduce a support and training programme to help partners get to grips with the new services and portal upgrade.
Plan co-founder Keith Curran said Plan's entry into the Internet of Things market and simplification of M2M connectivity orders for partners via the Plan portal was a response to market predictions.
"The Internet of Things is a planetary game changer for the mobile industry," he commented. "It is forecasted there will be 70 billion M2M connections made worldwide in the next five years at the rate of 130 a second. The market could be worth 14 trillion dollars. It is a massive untapped opportunity for our partners."
Craddock said Plan has no strategy at present to introduce a wholesale reseller model or enter the consumer market but he did not rule anything out in the future. "We are in this for the long haul and we are open to all ideas," he said.
Pictured above: The Plan team at Plan.Live