I2B Channel Buildout

The I2B Channel’s Backstory

Before it was formalized, the Authorized Retailer Business channel lacked dedicated Verizon Business infrastructure, standardized reporting, and a defined commission-support model. Much of the underlying partner sales and transaction data resided within Verizon Consumer Group systems, while Verizon Business had limited direct access and often relied on manual information requests. With reporting warehouses and data sources maintained separately across the two organizations, the channel operated without a unified Business-side view of performance, payout eligibility, or operational activity.

That changed when Verizon Business leadership moved to formally establish the channel as an official SMB sales motion. The initiative, known internally as Agent Transformation, brought the Authorized Retailer Business channel into Verizon Business’s broader channel structure to expand market reach, accelerate growth opportunities, and create a more scalable operating model.

As the channel was formalized, Verizon Business built the operational foundation required to support and scale it. Workstreams progressed simultaneously across Sales, Commissions, reporting, operational support, and cross-functional Business teams. A parallel reporting and reconciliation process improved visibility into partner activity and commission administration, while broader efforts established clearer ownership, more consistent processes, and the backend support model needed to operate the channel as part of Verizon Business.

At the same time, teams reverse-engineered the existing Retail to Business (R2B) model as an operational reference point for Indirect to Business (I2B). The goal was not to duplicate R2B exactly, but to adapt its proven capabilities—sales tools, reporting, support pathways, process governance, and partner enablement—to the distinct needs of the Authorized Retailer channel. This created a more consistent Business-selling and support experience across Exclusive Authorized Retailers, including organizations such as Victra, TCC, Wireless Zone, CSOK, and other partner groups.

The result was a channel that increasingly operated within the same Verizon Business ecosystem as other Business sales groups: connected to core systems, supported by cross-functional teams, and equipped with more consistent processes for sales activity, order management, service support, financial operations, and performance management. Rather than depending on manual workarounds or account managers as intermediaries for routine needs, partner agents gained clearer direct pathways to the tools, data, and support required to serve business customers and grow the channel.

The section below details just a few of my contributions to this transformation, including the cross-functional work used to expand channel access, strengthen operational controls, enable partner teams, and integrate new tools and processes into the Verizon Business environment.

Securing Artemis List Builder Access

SituationOur direct sales channel already had access to Artemis List Builder, a Salesforce-integrated prospecting tool that let sellers filter and build precise lead lists directly within their workflow. The Indirect channel - 8,000+ external agent sellers and the 90+ account managers who supported them - did not. That gap broke Verizon's own standard of tool parity between the two channels: partner sellers were left building prospect lists manually while internal reps worked from filtered, prioritized targets.

ObstacleThe barrier wasn't technical or budgetary - it was governance. Because external, third-party agents would be using the tool, extending access required clearing Legal review, compliance review, and national do-not-call requirements before anyone could touch it. When I brought the business case forward, the Artemis Senior Manager shut it down with one line: the channel was third party, and that alone was reason to say no - no exception process, no opening for discussion. Behind that sat a second challenge: even with approval, this would be a voluntary rollout to external agents, so adoption couldn't be mandated, only earned.

ActionI treated the objection as a claim to verify rather than a decision to argue - if a third-party restriction was actually written into the agreements, no amount of discussion would change it, and if it wasn't, none would be needed. I acknowledged we shared the same goal: protecting the company. From there I owned the resolution end to end: I identified the key Salesforce stakeholder and secured a meeting with the Salesforce team and the Artemis leader; researched the Business Major Account Agreement and the legal language around third-party restrictions myself; ran a series of calls with Legal, Risk, and Marketing Science to work through each concern; and verified national do-not-call policy requirements were met. Once access was approved, I coordinated field enablement with Learning & Development, validated that training materials reflected the approved version of the tool, and distributed training codes through agent partner POCs. Because the rollout wasn't mandatory, I tracked adoption through reporting and playbooks rather than enforcement.

ResultThe research came back clean - no restriction existed - and that evidence converted the Artemis Senior Manager from a firm "no" into an active sponsor of the request. Approval extended Salesforce-integrated prospecting access to 8,000+ indirect sellers and their 90+ account managers, putting partner reps on equal footing with internal reps for prospect identification, research, and opportunity development. Within roughly four months, the extension contributed to a 20% increase in funnel productivity, with adoption sustained through reporting-led support rather than mandates.

The approach here was the same one I bring to any stakeholder pushback: treat the objection as a claim to verify, not a position to argue with, and let the evidence do the persuading.

Data-Driven Budget and Program Governance

SituationA $5M/year equipment discount budget, spread across multiple programs but tracked as a single pot of money, was being overutilized due to inconsistent tracking and limited accountability. Sales leadership wanted to shift budget accountability from internal account managers to the agent side, so agents could see their own spend and hold their own teams accountable. No model for that existed: no submission structure, no controls, no budget allocation capability at the agent level. Left unaddressed, the complexity risked backend processing delays for Finance and Offline Support, rep confusion, and a degraded customer experience.

Objective / Opportunity / ObstacleAn SVP wanted to know whether these programs were actually profitable, and used that question to cut several above-the-line offers, like a $100 port-in credit per smartphone line, that had been stacking on top of other business promotions and adding complexity nobody had fully accounted for. That decision created the opening to build the agent-side ownership model the right way from the start, rather than patch the existing internal tracking.

ActionMy approach to a redesign like this is to identify the true constraint before designing the solution. I flagged the risk before launch, established simplified operating policies and documentation (SOPs & job aids), and traced the tracking failure to its structural cause: internal account managers were tracking agent spend on the agents' behalf, creating a single point of failure and leaving agents without visibility or accountability for their own budgets.

I then redesigned the process around four constraints.

Tool access: Agents could not use the company's Google Workspace for compliance reasons, so Google Sheets was not viable. I taught myself Smartsheet and built an external-facing Agent Ops submission layer that prevented duplicate submissions, supported centralized program communications, and enabled new agent-level budget allocation and tracking.

Auditability: Moving ownership to third-party agents raised a Risk concern: how could we audit spending we did not directly control? The internal Sr. Account Managers who had previously audited that spend on the agents' behalf were being removed from the process, and Agent Operations couldn't fill that oversight gap between the retail agent and the company, so the change couldn't move forward until the audit gap was solved. I partnered with IT to build a cross-reference process instead of relying on manual review of every order, which wasn't realistic at that volume. The Smartsheet form only asked agents to self-select a broad device category, Smartphone, Tablet, or Hotspot Device, since it was designed to be quick to fill out, and each category carried a different allotment. IT wasn't set up to audit these requests, but I could get them to pull the actual device tied to the submitted phone number into a data file, which I then cross-referenced against every submission. That caught real problems: a tablet self-reported as a smartphone at a higher allotment than the program allowed, a device that didn't qualify under the program's policy at all, something like an Arlo camera or a business internet device, and cases where a customer's existing device was submitted as though it were a new line to inflate a sale. It wasn't automated verification, but it was a real audit control built on top of a form that could never be designed to support one, and it created the audit trail that met compliance requirements without adding friction for agents.

Stakeholder ownership: Because Client Partners owned the relationship with agent leaders, I kept them aligned on the strategy and rollout while designing controls that protected the budget. I reserved 10% of each allocation as an internal contingency, requiring agents approaching their limits to submit an approval request for additional funding. This protected larger opportunities without me having to go back to the Finance Sr. Director for incremental funds.

System limitations: I assessed what could realistically be automated before full indirect-channel integration and identified that POS automation above $100 was not feasible until the channel's integration matured, due to authorized-retailer hierarchy and VPN-access differences, which tracked with a pattern I'd already seen: the indirect channel ran into more POS issues overall than the direct channels. Rather than wait for a larger platform integration, my Director and I made the call to move forward with automated approvals up to $100 in $25 increments, while higher-value requests continued through the controlled Smartsheet workflow.

Across each constraint, I applied the same approach: diagnose the underlying barrier, align the right stakeholders, and design a workable control that improved the process immediately while supporting the longer-term automation path.

ResultThe governance dashboard I built became the tool my Director and Sr. Director used directly, with data flowing to Finance for AVP and SVP readouts. The redesigned structure, combined with direct conversations with agents about their spending behavior, drove a $750K reduction in annual spend, informed an SVP-level decision to restructure the program, and put the reporting on a foundation built for further automation.

Owning Issue Resolution

SituationA lot of operational friction never shows up as one big problem, it shows up as a steady stream of smaller ones that all trace back to the same operating gap. The 90+ internal account managers serving the Indirect channel were fielding a high and growing volume of field escalations for system, credit, and porting issues, well over 200 to 300 per month, through a workflow manager inbox plus ad hoc direct emails and Slack messages to whichever teammate might know the answer. The channel was structured that way by design: my peer and I made up a two-person national support layer for 8,000+ external agent sellers, and the 90+ account managers were the support and strategy layer that made that scale workable.

Obstacle / OpportunityThat setup siloed account managers from each other's troubleshooting: if someone had already solved a similar issue, there was no way to know unless you happened to ask the right person. Nothing was captured as structured data, so recurring root causes stayed invisible: patterns were visible only through individual experience, and the same issues got re-investigated from scratch. And different support functions each owned a piece of the failure points, with no one seeing the pattern across the whole.

ActionStanding up the workflow: I proposed replacing the legacy inbox and email process with a standardized Slack intake workflow backed by a Google Sheets analytics backend. Before building it, I floated the change on our monthly All Hands call, and the account managers supported the change, speaking up and posting in the meeting chat. The change was approved before implementation, with the Slack channel kept private so issue details stayed inside the team. Once the workflow was live, I partnered with my Senior Director to have the legacy workflow submission form deactivated, since retiring the old path had to come from leadership, and we reinforced using the Slack channel over side channels and direct emails so coverage held even when my peer or I were out.

Turning data into signal: The new workflow gave account managers live visibility into open issues and the troubleshooting conversations behind them. I captured every submission as structured data (issue type, support function, root cause, resolution status), built pivot analysis on top of it, and reviewed it monthly to surface recurring patterns and turn them into action items for whoever needed to own them. I created job aids in multiple formats to help account managers route their own issues correctly upfront, and stood up a second Slack channel dedicated to urgent mass operational communication. For example, I posted a systemwide point-of-sale issue and workaround the moment the systems team notified operations, getting critical information to the front line faster than email alone.

Cross-functional root-cause work: From there, I worked across support functions such as billing operations, finance operations, fraud, porting, credit, payments, and write-off, with others engaged depending on the issue, to drive root cause resolution and process changes where the data showed recurring failure points. I brought that data to monthly stakeholder meetings that ran in both directions: support teams raised issues caused by the field, and the field's data showed where support processes needed clarification or correction. That kept conversations focused on root cause instead of the ticket in front of us. I always started from the requester's actual experience, checked it against the company's documented process to find where the two diverged, and looked for a workaround while backend fixes were pending so no one was left stuck.

ResultThe standardized Slack workflow gave account managers a shared, searchable record of every issue instead of scattered inbox threads and one-off Slack messages, which is what actually stopped the re-asking. Feeding every submission into structured data let me build pivot analysis that surfaced which failure points kept recurring and which team, process, or behavior owned the next action, so those conversations could focus on root cause instead of the individual ticket in front of us. Over roughly 8 months, that combination cut monthly escalation volume by 50%, more than 100 fewer issues every month.

Realigning Four Organizations After a Reorg

SituationA company-wide reorg eliminated Consumer Indirect Account Managers nationwide at the end of Q1, with no handoff and no replacement for the team that had handled promo resolution for 8,000+ agent partners. A newly formed Center of Excellence on the Consumer side was created to absorb that work, but initially wasn't going to handle Business side promo corrections at all. Because that kind of service-level agreement sits above any one person's role, my manager and Sr. Director negotiated directly with Center of Excellence leadership to keep that work in place, with my team providing whatever Business side support was needed. I volunteered to take the lead on that support and became the Business side lead embedded in the transition. What was left was 6,000+ monthly submissions with nowhere to go and 90+ account managers fielding calls they had no way to answer.

ObstacleFour organizations that had never formally worked together, the agents themselves, the newly formed Indirect Center of Excellence, finance operations, and Business and Government Customer Operations, now had to operate as one process. The Indirect Center of Excellence, a Consumer division team, had never handled Business side operations before; agents had to learn a new submission path; and two downstream service centers had to integrate new inflow into their existing models, all without breaking partner facing service continuity.

ActionProcess design: The Indirect Center of Excellence owned the overall process and form design, since Consumer side agents were affected by the same form; my role was making sure that design accounted for Business side requirements and educating the Indirect Center of Excellence on which existing downstream tool to use for which promo type, Salesforce Get Support cases routing to billing operations, or the Promo Fallout Form routing to finance operations for manual review.

Training & enablement: I applied structured, hands-on coordination across all four organizations simultaneously: building awareness of the new process and closing knowledge gaps through documented, step-by-step training. The resistance from the Center of Excellence reps was hesitation, not pushback: they didn't understand the Business side of the company, and that unfamiliarity made them cautious. I addressed it directly by getting them the systems access they needed (Salesforce, for the promo types that required it), then training them on how finance operations handled the main promo types they'd see and, since they already had tool access, specifically on selecting the correct Indirect Business workflow option so each case pulled the right information and routed correctly on the backend.

Documentation strategy: I mapped the process at three levels of detail: a high-level overview for leadership, a functional ownership map showing exactly who owned each handoff, and rep-level documentation detailed enough to execute without assistance.

Root-cause resolution: Beyond the routine finance operations denials that hit every channel, one issue was specific to Indirect: promo submissions involving a trade-in device processed through an external trade-in partner. The Consumer side had visibility into when a customer dropped a device off at the store and applied credit at that point, since the customer had done their part. Business side finance operations had no access to that visibility and instead relied on a warehouse-receipt tracking tool, so when that confirmation wasn't there yet, they denied the request, sometimes for a device that had already been handed in. What that mismatch actually produced was a bottleneck neither side understood: the Center of Excellence would send over proof the device had been received at the store, finance operations would respond, and that back-and-forth over email backed up both centers' queues and hurt service levels on both ends, without anyone knowing why. I got the finance operations leader on a call with the Center of Excellence Sr. Analyst and her leader and walked through both processes side by side, which is when the visibility gap surfaced: neither side had realized the other was validating receipt against different data. Finance operations agreed to accept a screenshot of the Center of Excellence's confirmation as proof of receipt; since the submission form didn't support attachments, we solved it by having reps reply to the automated confirmation email with the screenshot, which linked it to the original case so both arrived together instead of the resolution waiting on a separate reply that could take days to weeks.

ResultA standardized intake and escalation process held within roughly one to two months, since the legacy process ended immediately, submissions routed directly to finance operations and billing operations from day one once access and procedures were finalized. Submission volume actually declined month over month afterward, a signal that agents were getting it right the first time, not just tolerating the change.

Resolving a Salesforce Lead Routing Gap

I noticed dot-com leads were falling out of the funnel for the Indirect channel because of a systemic Salesforce hierarchy problem: non-standardized agent titles across retailers were breaking the rollup structure. In Verizon's direct channel, leads that fall out of the funnel route automatically up a manager and director hierarchy, but that automated routing wasn't happening for the indirect partner channel because of the inconsistent agent title data.

As an interim fix, I built a recurring manual audit workflow, run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, across Salesforce and the location management database, cross-referencing store location codes to reroute misdirected leads to the correct agent partners. I ran that manual audit for about a year while pursuing a structural fix, personally writing the business case that ultimately secured funding for an automated resolution to the underlying hierarchy gap.

Once implemented, misrouted leads began routing automatically to the correct agent partner, and up the hierarchy when needed, the same way direct-channel fallout already worked, eliminating the manual pull, analyze, assign process the interim workflow had required. Leads weren't tracked further downstream once assigned, the goal was correct assignment, not attribution past that point.

Coordinating the B360 POS Migration

When Verizon migrated its POS platform from a legacy system to one designed to cut clicks, accelerate revenue capture, and improve the customer experience, IT and design teams had no direct way to reach the 8,000+ external agent partners in the channel, they're third party, outside Verizon's internal systems and communication channels entirely. Without field input, the new platform risked launching with unresolved friction points; without a coordinated transition, agents risked being stranded the moment the legacy system sunset.

I became the sole conduit to the field, working through contacts at each agent company who then looped in their own sales reps. Over the roughly year-long rollout, I coordinated 40+ structured testing calls, with about 50 reps attending each, to surface friction points and gather direct feedback; design teams took that feedback back and built a platform with fewer clicks per transaction and more guided flows.

I kept both systems accessible in parallel throughout the transition on purpose, the goal was getting agents comfortable on the new platform before the legacy system went dark, not forcing a hard cutover, since pushing 8,000+ third-party partners onto unfamiliar territory right before a mandatory sunset would have created its own adoption risk. All 8,000+ agents were migrated by the mandated go-live date, since the legacy system's sunset cut everyone over simultaneously, but the real measure of success sat earlier than that date: agents had a full year of parallel access and 40+ structured testing sessions to get comfortable on the new platform, rather than being forced to learn it cold once the old system disappeared.

Closing a Territory Data Access Gap

Verizon's commission policy required new location information to be submitted 7 days before month end so the territory and commissions teams had time to process changes across all sales channels. Reps consistently submitted door changes on the last day of the month instead, not realizing the cross-channel processing time required, which pushed new locations into the wrong month's data, created downstream quota discrepancies, and left reps getting paid a full month late against the deadline they had missed.

The territory and rep-assignment data I needed to catch these late-cycle changes early lived in Verizon's Consumer Division Tableau reporting, which the Business side had no default access to. Verizon doesn't allow cross-divisional data access by default, so getting visibility into data the Business side didn't own and had never had access to required a formal approval process, not just a request. I wrote the business case that secured that access.

With that visibility, I built a Google Sheets tracking workflow that flagged reps and territories approaching the submission cutoff before they missed it. The process evolved from there: at first, the Territory Management POC had to pull the information from my spreadsheet and copy it onto her own, so I streamlined that by adding the workflow directly as a tab inside the sheet she already maintained, removing a duplicate step for both of us. Territory Management adopted the workflow as their own official process.

Driving AI Adoption Across the Channel

I was selected as a High-Potential representative on Verizon's AI Automation and Adoption Pillar for the Indirect channel, serving as the lead introducing AI tools to my peers and the 90+ account manager team. The role had two parts: driving AI adoption across those 90+ account managers, and researching how other companies were using AI internally and with customers to brief AVP-level leadership.

My first responsibility was driving adoption of the AI tools already embedded in reps' daily workflows, closing the usage gap through hands-on enablement rather than a one-time rollout announcement. From there, working with IT, I helped expand Salesforce's Velocity AI so it could interpret billing data and surface upsell opportunities and customer trends reps would otherwise have had to dig for manually, giving reps a single place to see consolidated customer insights, business profile data, web research, reviews, and industry context, and letting them run mock customer Q&A and pushback simulations to prepare for objections before a call instead of during one. I also helped shape AI-driven email prioritization so reps could surface urgent, business-critical messages instead of digging through a flooded inbox.

On the enablement side, I trained Sr. Managers on integrating Gemini GEM and NotebookLM into live project workflows, showing them how to automate meeting summaries and generate concise all-hands recaps for field teams. I also drove the initiative and defined requirements for converting my 70+ page "Where Do I Go?" sales playbook, which I built as a Google Slides deck, into an AI-queryable workflow; IT owned the technical AI conversion, and I owned the requirements, content, and field-readiness definition.

Automating Quota Relief for Weather-Closed Stores

When a store closed due to severe weather, the sales reps assigned to it needed quota relief so they weren’t penalized for numbers a closure made impossible to hit. That adjustment didn’t live in any system.

It lived in a manual process: pull the relevant reports out of Tableau, export them to Excel, run VLOOKUPs and pivot tables to isolate the affected reps and territories, calculate the relief percentage by hand, then get the number to Finance before the adjustment deadline. Miss a step, and an account manager absorbed a penalty a store closure caused, not their own performance.

Before bringing this to IT, I mapped the process end to end: every report pulled, every calculation, every handoff between systems and teams. Not just to hand it off, but to understand the logic well enough to translate it into requirements IT could actually build from. That’s requirements gathering, even without the title: turning a manual process that spanned sales, finance, and IT into scalable logic a system could run on its own.

I partnered with IT to build that logic into an automated workflow that delivered the relief percentage straight to Finance without anyone needing to remember to run it. Quota relief accuracy improved 29%, and 90+ account managers stopped absorbing penalties for closures outside their control.

→ View Presentation (PDF)