Q&A: 20:20 sales director Jon Miller

You have recently taken over from Steve Sanghera as sales director for the independent channel. Why the change?
At the back end of October we made some structural changes and Steve (Sanghera) became more involved with some of the global operations. I had been involved in the dealer channel previously with 20:20 about eight years ago.

Previous to this, my role was sales director of the insurance division, which has seen a lot of success, and I also ran the MVNO division. So I have been doing those kinds of roles over the past three and half years.

How have things changed in that time?
It’s a bit of bizarre situation coming back to an event like this. Some names are absolutely the same and some have changed. But the principle that we need to offer good service and good value remains.

How important is this event for 20:20?
Premier Partner events have been fantastic for us. They have helped to take away some of the old myths about us. 20:20 has been accused of being arrogant in the past, no doubt about that, but we have gone through a massive evolution over the past few years and we have moved away from that negativity.

At previous events we have talked about everything we do as a business, and we do a ridiculous amount of things for a lot of people. But what we are doing now is focussing more on the corporate proposition, and building closer relationships. Testament to that is the fact we have, in a relative short space of time, got a number of premier partners signed up to contractual relationships, which is quite a big change in this channel.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re BT or Jersey Telecom, we supply you with products and added value. And there are opportunities for both parties in that relationship.

How many exclusive arrangements with partners do you have?
In the independent sector, which is the Premier Partner programme, we now have six exclusive arrangements from around 60 partners. They have all been signed at different times.

Pure Mobile was signed about six months ago, Outsourcery much the same time, Jersey Telecom is about to be completed and Unicom has just gone live. We are extremely pleased with this and we will be looking to add more.

Full article in Mobile News issue 464 (May 24, 2010).

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