Q: Cellular IoT connectivity is a high-growth market and already features across much of the UK channel. Why hasn’t that automatically translated into consistent revenue for some?
Cellular is already there in a lot of partner propositions — backup, rapid deployment, primary connectivity, IoT devices — so the question isn’t whether it can be sold. It clearly can.
Where it tends to fall down is consistency. A lot of cellular sales are still situational. They come up when there’s a specific problem to solve, a deadline to hit, or a fixed-line issue to work around. That’s fine early on, but it doesn’t automatically create a repeatable revenue line.
To get consistency, pricing, delivery and support all need to behave in a way that holds up as volumes grow. If those things change deal by deal, partners naturally stay cautious about pushing it harder.
Q: You’ve said the issue isn’t demand. Can you explain what you mean by that?
There’s no shortage of underlying need. IoT is a high-growth market and connectivity is increasingly central to how services are delivered.
What partners are careful about is the responsibility that comes with scaling it. Once services become operationally relied on, you’re not just selling connectivity — you’re supporting something that customers depend on day to day. That brings commercial, delivery and support implications that need to be thought through properly.
That caution isn’t hesitation. It’s rational. Partners want to know that if they sell more of something, it won’t introduce complexity or risk they didn’t plan for.
Q: You often talk about customers deploying “connected estates” rather than buying SIMs. Why does that distinction matter?
Because estates behave very differently over time.
A SIM sale on its own is transactional. An estate introduces lifecycle management, resilience expectations, visibility, and operational dependency. And what starts small often doesn’t stay that way.
You see it all the time. Pre-ethernet connectivity that later becomes relied on as backup. Backup links that start carrying regular traffic during business hours. IoT pilots that move quickly from proof-of-concept into something operationally critical as estates scale.
When connectivity becomes recurring, distributed and relied on, it’s commercially real — even if it didn’t start out that way. That’s the point where the sales and delivery model needs to reflect how the service is actually being used.
Q: You’ve described cellular as often being treated as an add-on. What does that look like in practice?
Treating cellular as an add-on is often the right call early on. It lets partners move quickly — adding temporary connectivity to get a site live while fixed-line delivery completes, or bolting on backup for a specific location without over-engineering the service.
The issue is when those exceptions become normal.
Commercially, add-on behaviour usually means cellular is quoted separately, justified case by case, and treated as something outside the core service. Even as reliance grows, it still sits on the edge of the proposition rather than being designed in.
When that happens, it stays reactive. And when a product stays reactive, it struggles to become strategic. That’s where you start to see scale strain.
Q: What’s the difference between a one-off cellular deal and something that genuinely scales?
One-off deals prove capability. They show what’s possible.
Scalable models prove maturity. They behave predictably as volume increases. Pricing doesn’t need to be reinvented. Delivery doesn’t become bespoke every time. Support effort doesn’t spike unexpectedly as estates grow.
Big deals can look great on paper, but they often hide complexity that only shows up later — inconsistent assumptions, bespoke pricing, or delivery models that don’t stretch cleanly. That’s usually where momentum slows.
Q: Where do you most often see scale start to break down?
Complexity is the biggest constraint.
It rarely arrives in one big decision. It accumulates. A bespoke pricing decision here. A one-off delivery approach there. Unclear ownership introduced incrementally as services grow.
Individually, those decisions make sense. Collectively, they slow momentum across sales teams and make partners less confident about pushing volume.
That’s why simplicity matters so much — not because environments are simple, but because growth becomes hard to sustain if the commercial model isn’t.
Q: Earlier in your career, did you think about scale differently?
Yes, definitely.
Earlier on, I believed scale came from energy — more activity, more deals, more momentum. And that’s not wrong, up to a point.
What experience teaches you is where that stops working. You can’t will repeatable revenue into existence just because teams are motivated or the market is growing. It’s fuelled by product simplicity, pricing clarity, a defined support model, and when provisioning and billing just work — quickly and reliably.
That’s when effort compounds instead of cancelling itself out.
Q: What is Pangea focused on to support that kind of scale?
The focus isn’t on telling partners to sell more cellular. It’s on designing the conditions that make cellular easier to sell well at scale.
That means clarity in how it’s positioned, packaged and priced. Delivery and support models that don’t become heavier as estates grow. And systems and processes that
allow partners to move from first deployment to something repeatable without re- deciding fundamentals every time.
You’re not removing complexity from customer environments — you’re stopping unnecessary complexity from building up in the commercial model.
That work is supported by what’s already in place — from a technically broad portfolio, to a sales team used to working alongside partner teams on real opportunities, to enablement-led marketing that supports partners through live customer conversations, and an IoT Portal that becomes essential as estates scale. Together, those pieces give partners the building blocks to make IoT a foundational part of their portfolio, rather than something that stays peripheral.
Q: How important is the human side of the channel in all of this?
It matters more than I realised early on in my career.
The UK channel scales when partners feel part of something — when there’s shared momentum, when wins are celebrated, and when it’s enjoyable to do business together. That human element sits alongside the structure and the systems.
Structure creates the foundations. Simplicity allows things to scale. Relationships create the loyalty that compounds. You need all three.
Q: Finally, what should partners expect to feel different working with Pangea?
Cellular should start to feel more structured than situational.
Partners shouldn’t be second-guessing where it fits or how it behaves commercially. Pricing should be clearer. Delivery should feel lighter. Forecasting should be more confident.
If cellular in a partner’s portfolio feels more predictable than opportunistic, then we’ll be doing our job well.
To learn more visit: www.pangea-group.net
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