Verizon Business is taking a new sales tact for enterprise customers, announcing in a Web conference yesterday that it is creating a new agent partnership program that targets its largest customers.

Prior to this, sales agents and channels were part of one organization within Verizon Telecom that handled all sizes of customers, and that organization will continue to serve small to mid-sized businesses. Larger companies will now be served by the Verizon Business Indirect Channel Alliance program, said Maggie Hallbach, regional vice president for Verizon Business.

“The partnership program will be very closely aligned with Verizon Business’s direct sales channel and will be focusing on the solutions-selling approach that we use in our direct sales,” she said. “We think that our partners are going to benefit from greater focus, enhancements and training around our suite of products including IP-based services, managed services, security and professional services to help sell far more strategically and address the IP transformation enterprises are going through.”

As part of the new program, Verizon Business will be “providing them greater access to sales force automation tools, ordering tools, pricing tools and contracting tools,” Hallbach said. “They will have a greater level of technical resources for complex sales arrangements.”

By more closely aligning its direct and indirect sales channels, Verizon Business expects to not only capture new customers but develop deeper relationships with those customers, she said.

“We have a large number of partners today who have very deep relationships with many enterprises in the marketplace that the Verizon Business direct channel doesn’t have, or deeper relationships that what we have,” she said. “It may be a matter of a vertical market expertise, a particular technology or integration capability that Verizon Business doesn’t have on a direct level.”

Verizon Business’s indirect sales channels include very large systems integrators and smaller niche players with particular expertise, Hallbach said. All will have access to the expanded tool set through a portal that Verizon Business will establish, as well as new compensation incentives, beginning in 2008.

“The indirect channel is an ever-increasingly important channel for us,” she said.