The biggest breeding ground for corruption among cloud giants: double calculation
Latest update time：2023-05-30
Reads：
"
Double calculation, one side is an angel, the other side is a devil.
"
Author | Hu Min
Editor | Zhou Lei
In March 2015, Zhang Hua went to Hangzhou to attend the opening ceremony of the first batch of members of Hupan University.
After listening to the sharing from many business leaders running their companies, Zhang Hua decided to move the entire system to the cloud and quickly signed tens of millions of orders directly with leading domestic cloud vendors.
However, after many years of continuous cooperation with cloud vendors, Zhang Hua accidentally discovered something that shocked him.
At that time, one of his operation and maintenance employees resigned and was upset and unwilling to hand over the cloud account in time. As a result, the entire cloud management system could not be operated, and internal staff were anxious.
The employees tried to submit complaints to the cloud vendor's backend many times, but to no avail.
Because according to the service rules of the cloud vendor, when submitting an appeal for a virtual empty order, it is necessary to fill in the customer service number. In desperation, the employee had no choice but to find the original sales person to sign the order and ask for the customer service number. As a result, the salesperson told him that he had resigned long ago and could not check it.
Under these twists and turns, Zhang Hua had to take action personally and asked someone to find connections to check the customer number.
He wouldn't know it if he didn't check it. But when he checked it, he was shocked to find that the cloud service he had used for seven years was actually under the name of an agency company he had never heard of.
"I didn't know there was an agent at all. We have always signed directly with this cloud giant!" Zhang Hua was very excited at the time.
In a cooperation with direct sales, why do agents appear out of nowhere? Zhang Hua was puzzled. But what he doesn't know is that behind this may be a corruption incident involving internal and external collusion between cloud vendor employees.
All this starts with the cloud giant’s biggest source of corruption, “double accounting.”
01
Double counting gives employees the opportunity to collude inside and outside to share the spoils
The so-called double calculation is actually a system for distributing performance between agents and direct sales.
In the process of market development, original manufacturers and agents will inevitably "collide with customers". In order to prevent conflicts between the two parties and encourage both parties to jointly expand the market, the cloud vendors decided to pay double money to encourage the two to cooperate to promote customers. Once a customer successfully signs a contract, it will be counted as both direct sales performance and agent performance.
At the same time, in order to realize the association between sales and agents, cloud vendors have set up two methods: the first is when the customer registers and places an order through the exclusive link given by the agent, the association can be made; the second is Direct sales applies through the backend and associates customers with agents.
The latter is more hidden, and customers may become customers of agents without knowing it.
The situation Zhang Hua encountered was the latter.
Zhang Hua is not an isolated case. Some direct sales employees of several leading domestic cloud vendors have secretly transferred a large amount of their customer resources to agents.
Some direct sales are even more rampant. They directly find friends to set up an agency company and transfer all orders to their own agency company.
"This kind of operation is already an open secret. Most people don't dare to do it, but the timid will starve to death and the bold will die of starvation." A person familiar with the matter said frankly.
It sounds unreasonable to transfer your customers to agents. Why do direct sales do this?
This needs to start with the gradient rebate policy designed by cloud vendors.
Every year, agents set performance goals for the year. Generally, the higher the performance, the more rebates they can receive.
Taking the Alibaba Cloud rebate policy for fiscal year 2024 as an example, assuming that an elite partner completes all monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks and reaches the goal of 30 million, then the partner can receive 31% of the rebate. At the same time, if its annual performance growth reaches 30%, 48%, or 60%, there will be corresponding commission rebates of 8%, 12%, and 25% for the incremental performance.
The principle behind this gradient design is very simple. The more you work, the more you gain. It encourages agency partners to do more performance. There is not much problem with the design itself.
However, it is more difficult for agents to get the highest rebates by themselves.
Public data shows that Alibaba Cloud has more than 12,000 partners and serves more than 450,000 customers, but its annual sales exceed 10 million but only more than 300.
Can agents join forces with direct sellers to achieve results?
The answer is yes.
Under the double calculation rules of all cloud vendors, there is no conflict of interest between agents and direct sales, so some direct sales and treacherous agents began to find ways to cooperate and collude to share commissions.
Some agents even proposed bluntly: As long as direct sales are strong and help achieve high performance, they can transfer part of the rebate ratio and give it to direct sales privately.
"The agent takes half, the remaining half, two-thirds is returned to the customer, and the other third is secretly transferred to direct sales." An insider revealed to Leifeng.com.
For direct selling,
it is
equivalent to
working one job but making double money.
This has allowed corruption to flourish rapidly between direct sales and agents, and
has also caused
"
bad money to drive out good money
"
within cloud vendors
,
making many serious agents dissatisfied.
Liu Shimin is a veteran agent member of a cloud manufacturer. Something happened not long ago that made him very depressed.
After several of his employees resigned, they opened a separate agency company with cloud vendors for direct sales. Not only did they take away some of the company's old customers, but in the end these resigned employees actually became excellent partners of cloud vendors.
"On the day of the ecological conference, there were 11 people on the stage leading the charge, one of whom was an employee of our company, and three of them were former employees. I wanted to pour red wine on them that day!" Liu Shimin said.
Later, Liu Shimin complained about the matter to the internal executives of the cloud vendor. After receiving the evidence of violations, the other party did deal with the sales double regulation, but has yet to take action against the agency company.
(Regarding the personnel disputes and decision-making games during the period, please add the author to WeChat
mindy1857
to communicate)
On the one hand, the illegal agency is the top seller after all, and once it is killed, it is likely to cause panic among other agents and direct sales. On the other hand, cloud vendors' internal executives change frequently. Under such personnel turmoil, the management firstly prefers not to cause trouble, and secondly, they also believe that there will be no results in the short term.
"We worked hard, but the cloud vendors supported people with problems." This incident made Liu Shimin feel very aggrieved.
"If everyone wants to achieve results, obviously no one will want to serve customers!"
Indeed, service can be called the "lifeline" of To B manufacturers. If there is no service, no matter how big the customer is, they will be lost.
A practitioner who has purchased multiple clouds said: "When we choose cloud vendors, price is a consideration, but more importantly, service is the most important factor."
Currently, their company is purchasing the resources of a medium-sized cloud vendor. Although its brand name is not as loud as that of a major cloud vendor, it handles problems very efficiently. Problems can be solved with just one phone call, and the process is not cumbersome or complicated.
On the other hand, looking at several well-known domestic cloud manufacturers, customers, no matter how big or small, have suffered service losses from the big manufacturers.
Needless to say, small customers still have to submit a work order and go through the process to solve the problem. Although large customers are followed up by dedicated salespeople, the quality of the corresponding services can sometimes only be described as "perfunctory".
For example, Vanke has customers worth tens of millions of dollars and is also an industry leader in terms of reputation. However, according to industry insiders, even well-known companies such as Vanke were only allocated half a BD of service resources.
It is not that Vanke has not complained, but the countermeasures of the cloud vendors are only to change the candidates of BD, and the service process and quality have not improved at all.
However, this kind of service is difficult to see among foreign cloud vendors.
"When AWS serves tens of millions of customers like Vanke, it will be equipped with two SAs (service consultants) to help customers organize their business structure and channel planning." An industry insider said.
In addition to providing sufficient dedicated service personnel for large customers, AWS's entire service process and system are also relatively complete.
As a customer, as long as you are interested in migrating to AWS, AWS will have two major teams to provide you with corresponding service support. The entire process ensures that you can use the cloud and make good use of the cloud.
In the early stage of migration, many customers may not be able to complete the migration alone due to limitations in technical capabilities and personnel. At this time, you only need to pay a certain fee, and the AWS product service team will help you complete cloud migration and landing services. The specific cost is generally determined based on the difficulty of the migration, the duration of the migration, and the number of people to be relocated.
After the migration is completed, you can continue to pay a certain service fee, and AWS will assign a dedicated technical account manager to connect with you to ensure that the business runs stably after the service goes online.
However, some domestic manufacturers have sacrificed too many things in order to grow faster, which has also created countless loopholes in the rules.
02
Double calculation is the only way to resolve the conflict between direct sales and agents.
Double counting not only causes bad money in the ecology of large companies to drive out good money, but also greatly reduces the services of cloud vendors - then why did cloud vendors adopt double counting in the first place?
In fact,
the emergence of double counting is to solve the conflict between direct sales and agent customer acquisition.
Focusing on growth, increasing revenue, and focusing on scale are the unchanging strategies pursued by cloud vendors at the beginning of their development. For this reason, in the past few years, cloud vendors' ecological partner registration controls were relatively loose. As long as you are a company, you can register as a partner through the official website and obtain the qualifications for sales agents.
But at this stage, if both parties happen to connect with the same customer, not counting the performance of the original factory, the direct sales team will have no motivation; if no commission is given to the channel, there will be discord in the partnership.
Tencent Conference is a typical case of solving this contradiction. Leifeng.com once
analyzed the ecological construction of Tencent Conference in the article
"Reflections on Tencent Conference "Ecology": Find the right people, distribute the right money, and control the situation."
At the end of 2020, due to the catalysis of the epidemic, the demand for online meetings gradually became normal, and it became more necessary to provide more deployment, support and services for enterprises. Therefore, at the beginning of 2021, the ecological construction of Tencent Meetings was put on the agenda.
Tencent insiders revealed that at that time, cloud conferencing was relatively new in the industry, and the only one that could learn from it was Zoom. However, Zoom’s main market was still in the United States, and the Chinese market was not yet that popular. Therefore, when building the ecosystem of Tencent Conference, you basically need to explore it yourself.
In order to solve the problem of performance distribution, Tencent initially followed the practices of many To B original manufacturers and adopted single calculation. However, practice has proved that this distribution method is not suitable.
When their direct sales team
develops along industry lines, it is easy for
them to
"hit big customers" with their agency partners
.
In order to compete for customers, many agency partners have begun to "steal" from other peers by lowering prices, offering discounts, etc., which invisibly accelerates the escalation of conflicts between sales.
This is obviously not what the company wants to see. The conflict between agents and direct sales will not only damage overall performance, but also affect follow-up services.
So Tencent Conference introduced a double calculation system.
"Although there will be some losses, it will reduce internal conflicts and help everyone work together to quickly develop this market." A Tencent insider once said.
Indeed, judging from the subsequent feedback from agents,
under the double-counting mechanism, agents’ order signing speed has been accelerated a lot
.
An agent said frankly that customers recognize Yundachang's position in this market, and their introduction of direct sales into the project is equivalent to adding an endorsement, and the overall difficulty of signing the project will also be reduced.
"Tencent Cloud's advantage is that it will be more convenient to communicate with old customers, while our advantage is that it is more professional in POC testing, docking with specific application departments, and final delivery. The two advantages are superimposed, and when making the cake, we have achieved The effect of 1+1>2.”
Because of this, for a long time in the past, various cloud vendors have adopted double calculations in exchange for growth. The original factory and its partners cooperate with each other and divide labor. At this stage, double calculation is a "win-win".
03
Who can bear the cost of canceling double counting?
However, as cloud services accelerate their penetration into thousands of industries and increase their market share to a certain extent, the goals of cloud vendors have shifted from focusing on revenue to focusing on profits. As agent partners continue to increase, new management issues have also arisen.
Under the gradient incentive mechanism, each agent's emotions for performance are fully mobilized, and each agent is desperately trying to get the highest commission. This leads to frequent attempts to exploit each other's customers within the ecosystem, and "wrangling" occurs frequently.
If the cloud vendors do nothing, as mentioned above, high-quality agents will be filled with resentment; but if the cloud vendors are determined to get rid of double counting, the interests of another group of agents will be directly harmed.
The time has come to test the courage of big cloud companies.
Alibaba Cloud is
one of
the first manufacturers to "scratches and heal" and decide to cancel double computing
.
Not long ago, Alibaba Cloud announced the latest agency partner commission policy, which put a sudden brake on Shuangshuan-this decision was said to be made by Xiaoyaozi himself.
To cancel double counting, it is necessary to reorganize existing customers and clarify the ownership of each customer.
At present, the customer types of cloud vendors are roughly divided into three categories: one is the customers who are followed up by both direct sales and agents, the other is the customers who are followed up by direct sales and agents separately, and the other is customers who are not followed up by direct sales and agents. client.
The partner commission policy launched by Alibaba Cloud for fiscal year 2024 focuses on the redistribution of customers that were originally followed up by direct sales and agents,
and divides them into types A/B/C/D/E/F:
Category A: Alibaba Cloud head customers followed by Alibaba Cloud Business Technology Engineers (BTE)
Category B: Alibaba Cloud shoulder customers who are followed up by Alibaba Cloud Business Technology Engineers (BTE)
Category C: Customers who are followed up by Alibaba Cloud channel sales partners
Category D: Customers whose partners expand their own customers and do not have business technical engineers (BTE), channel sales, or telesales follow-up
Category E: Customers followed up by Alibaba Cloud Telemarketing
Category F: High seas customers, that is, Alibaba Cloud registered customers without business technical engineers (BTE), channel sales, telemarketing, and partner relationship follow-up
Judging from the above distribution, Alibaba Cloud has assigned most of the top, shoulder and small customers to the direct sales team, and only the mid-level customers are followed up by agents.
An executive from Cloud Dachang lamented to Leifeng.com, "At this time, cloud vendors must survive first. It is impossible for agency partners to rest on their past achievements."
Indeed, this distribution rule has caused dissatisfaction among individual agents. In their view, this reallocation will cause their performance to plummet.
(
For more information,
please add the author to communicate on WeChat
mindy1857
)
Leifeng.com learned that an agent in South China originally served many large A/B customers with a total annual distribution of 300 million yuan. However, after this adjustment, the total distribution volume shrank directly to 50 million yuan, and the corresponding rebate amount was also cut. Half, from 20 million yuan to no more than 10 million yuan.
Another agent that originally focused on the E/F small and medium-sized customer market also lost nearly millions in profits because of Alibaba Cloud's new policy.
In addition, although some agents are assigned to Class C customers, the new policy stipulates that the assigned customers can only be included in the agent's performance if they produce incremental performance. For example, when an agent takes over a Class C customer, the customer has an original performance of 4 million yuan. According to the new policy, only when the agent signs another order on this basis, this is considered the agent's performance.
Achieving incremental performance is obviously not an easy task. It's like climbing a mountain, the higher you go, the harder it becomes.
Combined with the fierce competition in the cloud market, agents also have a performance of 4 million, and going from 4 million to 8 million is naturally much more difficult than 0 to 4 million.
Of course, Alibaba Cloud also took into account the difficulty of the task when formulating the new policy.
Not only did it
allocate
a large number of
waist customer business opportunities to
high-quality
agency partners, but the rebate ratio given this year was higher than in previous years
. For example, the original monthly commission rate was 10%, but now it has been increased to 15%.
"For cloud vendors, the performance fluctuations and reform pains caused by canceling the sequelae of double counting are all expected. After all, behind every rule change, there will always be a redistribution of interests. In this process, there will always be If the company suffers, there will also be companies that will benefit. Alibaba Cloud’s adjustment is generally good, and there will be more beneficiaries.”
People are always afraid of change, but in the eyes of fellow distribution executives and leading agents, Alibaba Cloud's courage to cross the hill has undoubtedly set a positive example for the distribution market and can further promote ecological enterprises and follow the lead of large companies in the market. Evolve together in this era of uncertainty; it also makes the company's financial governance more healthy and transparent.
04
Are you an angel or a devil?
Is the double counting system an angel or a devil?
In fact, there is no hard and fast answer to this question. It can not only become an engine to promote performance growth, but also become a breeding ground for corruption.
In the early stages of development, cloud vendors adopted double calculation. Although it was a "spend of money" and the cost increased significantly, the money was well spent, bridging the conflict between direct sales and agents, in exchange for To achieve growth, it is a win-win choice.
Nowadays, some companies choose to cancel double counting, which is also a kind of trend.
On the one hand, the long-term implementation of double accounting has led to various corruption phenomena that urgently need to be rectified by enterprises.
Ren Zhengfei once said: "If the company allows corruption to occur and does not make more improvements in the system and strengthen education, the company will perish."
At the end of last year, Ma Huateng also pointed out similar problems at Tencent’s internal employee meeting. He emphasized that the corruption problem within the group is "really shocking". Many businesses cannot be completed, not because of problems with managers or business direction, but because of too many corruption loopholes and the business has been hollowed out.
On the other hand, as cloud vendors have entered a new stage and revenue growth is gradually slowing down, companies naturally need to consider how to better reduce overall operating costs. We have also analyzed the "internal and external troubles" faced by cloud vendors in previous articles. The current cost reduction and efficiency improvement actions are also reasonable.
In other words, there is actually no right or wrong in any policy. It just depends on how to achieve a balance between all parties at the appropriate stage and in the appropriate way.
As McMurray in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest says during a group therapy session: "The art of balancing is an art. All policies depend on how and when they are implemented."
Regarding the conflict of interest between cloud giants and agents, there are many inside stories that have not been disclosed in this article. Add the author to
communicate with
mindy1857
on WeChat
. Next, we will also launch a series of manuscripts on the ecosystem of cloud giants.
Note: Zhang Hua and Liu Shimin are pseudonyms.
//
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