The "Circuit and Seat" era is over.
Ten years ago, you built a dynasty on bandwidth and UCaaS. You found a business park, blanketed it with flyers, and waited for the phone to ring. The commissions were healthy. The sales cycles were short. The technology was simple enough that you didn’t need a degree in computer science to explain why a dedicated circuit was better than broadband. It was a good time to be in the channel.
That gravy train has derailed.
Commoditization turned connectivity into a race to the bottom. UCaaS is now sold in pre-packaged bundles that require little advisory work. If your entire book relies on these pillars, you’re standing on quicksand. The market has shifted, and the 10x commissions of the 2010s are not coming back. You have likely felt this already. It manifests as shrinking margins and clients who treat you like a vendor rather than a partner.
Growth now requires a fundamental shift in how you position your portfolio.
We need to talk about the "Comfort Zone Trap." This is the single biggest growth inhibitor of partners today. You sell what you know. You know dial tone, circuits, you might even know a little bit about CCaaS. You stay in your lane because it feels safe. You worry that if you bring up cloud infrastructure or repatriation, the client will ask questions you cannot answer. You fear looking incompetent will cost you existing revenue.
This fear is costing you your best accounts.
Consider a partner I know well. Let’s call him Mark (hi Mark). Mark sold UCaaS and connectivity into a mid-sized logistics firm in the Midwest. He was comfortable. He checked in once a quarter, bought the CIO lunch, and renewed the contracts like clockwork. He never asked about servers or backup strategies. He figured that was "IT stuff" and he was a "Telecom guy." He thought staying in his lane offered account stability.
Mark was wrong.
The logistics firm had a crisis. Their public cloud costs were spiraling out of control, and they were hitting performance bottlenecks in their inventory database. They didn't call Mark because they didn't think he handled "real" IT problems. They called a firm that advertised "Holistic Infrastructure Optimization."
That new firm came in and didn't just fix the immediate problem. They audited the entire environment. They realized the cloud bill was bloated because the client was paying insane egress fees and for compute instances that were zombied. The new firm proposed a "Cloud Repatriation" strategy that would move select workloads to bare metal infrastructure. They wrapped it with a managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) package to solve a compliance gap.
Mark didn't just lose the upsell. He eventually lost the seats too. The new firm took the entire account because they owned the architecture, not just the dial tone. When the renewal came up, Mark was pushed out. He had allowed his account to be diluted because he was too late to expand his offerings.
Your competition is already doing this.
Diversification of product mix is not just a way to make more money, it is the only way to defend your turf. Other partners are aggressively pivoting from single solution selling to multi-line portfolios. They are talking to your clients about Infrastructure, Cloud, AI, Application Hosting, and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) right now. If you are not having these conversations, you are effectively holding the door open for them.
Let's look at the natural expansion paths. You already have the entry points.
Internet circuits and UCaaS are still the "front door." They get you into the building. But once you are inside, you need to look around.
Backup or datacenter services are ideal fast followers. If you sell a client their network connectivity today, you are already touching their most critical data. Ask yourself where that data lives. Is it secure? Who manages the uptime? Follow the wire!
This is your bridge to Managed IT Infrastructure services.
A client buying CCaaS/UCaaS also has infrastructure needs. Few are the clients requiring those services that don’t also have compute, storage, and networking at some scale. That leads to a conversation about Private Cloud. If that infrastructure is critical (it is), it needs a disaster recovery plan. That leads to Backup or Disaster Recovery conversations. Suddenly, you aren't just selling a license. You are selling the resilience of their entire IT estate.
Cloud Repatriation is perhaps the most urgent opportunity in 2026.
(Not so subtle plug, you can read my channel predictions for 2026 here.)
For years, CIOs shouted “Everything must go to hyperscalers, we’re cloud first!”. Companies moved petabytes of data to AWS and Azure without doing the math. Now, the bills are as thick as phone books (remember those?). CFOs are seeing six-figure monthly costs for storage and compute that used to cost less than half that on-premise.
This is where you bring value.
You can walk in and ask a simple question: "Are you happy with your cloud spend?”
The answer will almost always be "no, but what can you do about it?". This opens the door to Bare Metal solutions. Bare Metal offers the raw power of dedicated hardware without the virtualization tax of the public cloud. It is faster and cheaper for steady state workloads, and gives control back to the client. This is not a retreat or admission of failure. It is a step towards maturity, an inevitable evolution of IT infrastructure.
Selling across these multiple product lines creates "stickiness."
A client who buys only internet from you will leave for a nickel savings per megabit. A client who trusts you with their connectivity, their voice, their server infrastructure, and their backup strategy is not going anywhere. Unwinding that relationship is painful and risky. You become entrenched. Your wallet-share increases, but more importantly, your strategic value skyrockets. You stop being a vendor and start being a true advisor.
The hesitation you feel is normal.
You’re likely thinking: "I can’t do this. I don't know how to architect a bare metal environment. I don't know the first thing about disaster recovery or immutable backups."
Good. You shouldn't.
Your job is not to be the engineer; your job is to identify the opportunity and bring in the expert. You are Air Traffic Control. You clear the runway; you don't fly the plane.
But you do need the right pilot.
This is exactly how our partners use Summit. We scope the specs and act as the technical extension of your sales team. We understand the nuances of hybrid cloud deployment, so you don't have to.
Leveraging a trusted provider like Summit allows you to punch well above your weight class. You can walk into a Fortune 1000 meeting and confidently pitch a complex infrastructure overhaul, knowing that you have the bench strength to deliver. You maintain the relationship. You build client trust. Summit handles the complexity.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Growth only happens when you step outside the safe confines of what you already know. If you are comfortable, you are stagnating. The market is moving too fast for stagnation.
The partners who win in the next three years will be the ones who refuse to be pigeonholed. They will look at a client's business holistically. They will see a circuit not as a connection, but as the first thread in a web of services that includes cloud, resiliency, and hardware.
Look at your book of business today. Pick five clients and ask yourself what would happen if another partner called them tomorrow and offered to audit their cloud infrastructure. If the thought makes you sweat, you know what you need to do.
The circuit salad days are over. Your era of being indispensable is here. If this sounds like you, let’s set up a call and see how we can work together.
Good Selling,
Eric