Lumen Technologies’ Dave Young On Channel Chief Role And The Carrier’s New Indirect Channel Structure

‘It takes more than Lumen and a customer to be successful here. It takes Lumen, another company, and customer to find shared success. I really think that was very eye opening to me as we began to talk about why we were putting the organization together,’ Dave Young, Lumen’s new SVP of strategic sales, tells CRN.

Sweeping Change

The carrier formerly known as CenturyLink is in the midst of a large transformation. As part of that metamorphosis, Lumen Technologies this month revealed plans to divest itself of two parts of its business as it faces some financial headwinds, including its incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) business, which includes its consumer, small business, wholesale and mostly copper-served enterprise customers and assets in 20 states to investment management firm Apollo Global Management in a $7.5 billion deal. It’s also divesting its Latin American Business to investment firm Stonepeak for $2.7 billion in another deal that the company said will help it return to revenue growth and leave room for Lumen to invest in strategic business services.

Then, the Monroe, La.-based provider revealed it is shaking up its indirect channel structure. First, the company announced that its channel chief for the last four years, Garrett Gee, would be leaving the business and succeeding him would be Dave Young. Young, who most recently served as senior vice president of Lumen’s Public Sector and Global Hyperscaler business, then stepped into the newly created role within the indirect channel team, senior vice president of Strategic Sales.

Telecom veteran Young has been with Lumen, CenturyLink, and Level 3 Communications for the last 19 years, with plenty of time spend in the Government, Public Sector, and Hyperscaler businesses. He’s also well-versed in enterprise-grade connected security, collaboration, and cloud and edge solutions. Under Young’s leadership, Lumen’s indirect team is being brought together with the company’s System Integrator, Hyperscaler and Digital Ventures groups as a way to help the company better serve end customers through partnership with other providers and partners.

Young virtually sat down with CRN to talk about his new role and why Lumen created his position, his plans to tightly integrate the indirect channel team with other parts of Lumen’s business, and what channel partners should now right now.

Here’s what Young had to say.

Are you the de facto channel chief for Lumen Technologies?

Great question that I think a lot of people have been asking. I think there are a variety of models in the marketplace and [the channel chief model] is definitely is a common model.

The only way to understand the go-forward model is to take some time to do the things that I’m doing now — like talking and listening to partners — and I’m getting a lot of feedback. I think in time, we’re certainly going to have an idea of what the markets are asking for and what I’m going to be.

What are your first priorities in your newly created role of SVP of strategic sales?

I definitely had a list of things when I was getting ready to be announced [as SVP of strategic sales] and then immediately got overwhelmed with meeting partners, customers, and my new employees. As much as I wanted to have actions as I’m an action-driven person, I believe that the pause to interact with all of these different aspects of my new life was the more positive thing to pursue as I validated thoughts, things I’ve seen, and the things I could easily equated to my previous experiences at Lumen and begin to build some of the plan. My number one [goal] was to meet partners, customers, and employees.

What we’re doing is we’re putting together a new organization and the foundation is the indirect channel. It’s a very important foundation. And a lot of what we see in other parts of the markets that we’ve put together in this group, you can see very easily in the indirect channel. All of the markets I’ve been asked to lead all require another company to create a solution for a customer. It’s not just a direct two-party interaction. It’s a three-party interaction. And whether that’s the hyperscalers, system integrators, or the indirect channel, all of the require Lumen, another company and a customer to be able to understand what that relationship is. So really, the indirect channel is helping create that guidepost for the whole organization.

As Lumen’s indirect team is brought together with the System Integrator, Hyperscaler and Digital Ventures groups, what should partners take away from the new structure?

As we began to move towards the customer success model, we begin to put the variables back into our enterprise selling engine. One of the things that’s been underway for a while is Lumen’s movement to a customer success model. We began that journey with our indirect channel a couple of months ago as we began to think through what that would be. We [haven’t] fully operationalized that yet; we’re still working through how we can best work in a customer success model inside of the indirect channel. I’ve been spending time working to understand the similarities to how we’re doing it in enterprise, how we do it for our hyperscalers, and what are the nuances for the partner community that we need to think through in order to create a successful model.

As Lumen is beginning to look at a variety of things, one of the areas is the importance of the type of relationships we’ve put together in the strategic sales organization and the types of markets. And traditionally, maybe we wouldn’t have thought of them together like we have, but the foundation — that common thread — is that it takes more than Lumen and a customer to be successful here. It takes Lumen, another company, and customer to find shared success. I really think that was very eye opening to me as we began to talk about why we were putting the organization together. At the core, I’m really excited to see the leaders from across the different market segments get together and think. Because it’s remarkable when you put people together, how you see challenges differently and create a culture where we’re sharing solutions. Maybe the folks from the hyperscaler team can see some things from our indirect channel and maybe the indirect channel could see more into the system integrator channel. We’ll begin to share what works, what our experiences are, and what our ideas are. From that, I think we really create a strong foundation [that will] be part of the growth engine for Lumen in the next three to five years based around our strengths and partnering with other companies to create solutions.

How will you leverage his experience in the Public Sector and Global Hyperscaler business in your new role in the indirect channel?

In all of the businesses that we brought together, there’s been success. [It’s about] how we build upon the successes that we’ve had to understand how to drive new growth at pretty high rates across the new world. I think a lot of companies are beginning to think this way — they’re beginning to see how their own strategies can mix with other companies to come together to create solutions for customers. I think that that’s one of the places that I’m really comfortable in from the things I’ve done in my career, especially in the public market [where] it normally requires a list of subcontractors and the prime contractor to fulfill that role for the government. I’ve spent a lot of my career doing that, both as the prime pulling together a group of companies to solve a customer problem, or as a sub, where I know how to play my role inside somebody else’s prime world. I think a lot of the skills that I’ve used over the course of time really equate to what we’re seeing happen in business today, where multiple companies are coming together figuring out new ways to work together to take on customer relationship.

I think if we look at industry, government is the place where programmatic thinking really began, and we use it in a lot of different places. After spending as many years as I have there, my first corporate love was project management so many years ago, and a lot of what I do today is based around the learnings I had as a project manager — what is it, who owns it, when it’s getting done — the three basic things. Knowing what those are can help create programs or multiple projects that are linked together in similarity. I think some of the programmatic thinking I’ve used in my previous worlds, and how we approach markets is one way to look at what I think we can build from a relationship standpoint. Then, when we look at the digital environment, I’ve been very successful working inside of Lumen across our product [portfolio] and across our CIO organization, and through those relationships, we created marketplaces for the public market that talk to that market the way the public market talks, not necessarily how Lumen talks, and we’ve been able to do things from quote, to delivery, to insurance, that are unique to that market in a digital manner. So, some of the some of the things that I think I can bring to my new responsibilities — indirect being one — about how we can share information differently than maybe we’ve traditionally done.

What do you want Lumen partners to know?

Everywhere I go, everybody talks about our ability to relate with the partners, and just like any relationship, no relationship is perfect. But there’s a lot of positive interactions and sharing that occurs, and I think that there are some things that we can also work on to take some steps forward in how we can improve some things. But I think at the core of the foundation of the organization that I’m beginning to work with, it’s been really remarkable to hear that stories around the people — both the partners and inside Lumen that have come together.

There will be an aspect of getting to know Dave, because the partners already know Lumen. There are things I can bring to the channel that are my strengths and that’s how we can listen to what the community needs and get Lumen to understand that and then take action on it. I’m going through that learning curve, but let’s be honest about something. Lumen is a really big company, and just like any other big company, whether it happens gradually, or we have big market changes, the reality is that company companies change. So, there will be change, but do I know what it is? No. We change every day, and we try to always change with the customer — or in this case, the partner in mind — if we listen to them to understand how we can work on our relationship and improve the relationship by taking that coaching and working on the mode, that would be my goal.