ScanSource CEO: Sales Team Reorganization Will Bring Intelisys, Specialty Partners Together

‘Within ScanSource, [partners] were having to deal with two sales teams, an Intelisys sales team and a ScanSource Specialty sales team. We’re combining those starting with our communications area which traditionally sells all of our traditional telecom equipment, the Mitel, ShoreTel, Avaya, Polycom. All those partners that are selling hardware and cloud can now deal with one sales rep as we bring this to life,’ says ScanSource CEO Mike Baur.

ScanSource Thursday unveiled a strategic move to reshape how the Greenville, S.C.-based distributor’s partners sell both hardware and services via the creation of a unified sales team designed to streamline the process for solution providers.

This new team will handle both hardware and Intelisys services, a shift that’s expected to resonate with partners who have traditionally focused on hardware but are increasingly seeing demand for cloud and communications solutions from end users, ScanSource CEO Mike Baur told CRN.

“We believe the traditional communications solution provider community, those partners, will love the way we’re organizing this new team,” he said. “They will love the way we’re enabling them to sell new technologies to their end-user customers.”

Baur also discussed progress since last year’s ScanSource Partner First conference where the company outlined its “convergence” initiative to encourage partners to expand beyond hardware and incorporate services into their portfolios.

“Within ScanSource, [partners] were having to deal with two sales teams, an Intelisys sales team and a ScanSource Specialty sales team,” he said. “We’re combining those starting with our communications area which traditionally sells all of our traditional telecom equipment, the Mitel, ShoreTel, Avaya, Polycom. All those partners that are selling hardware and cloud can now deal with one sales rep as we bring this to life.”

Read more of CRN’s full conversation with Baur below, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

What’s the key takeaway from ScanSource’s second fiscal quarter 2026?

Well, the key takeaway is Q2 did not come in as we expected. However, our Intelisys business, which we’ve talked about a lot from an opportunity standpoint, continues to do well, and we created a new sales team that we announced today that will sell hardware and our Intelisys services with one sales team. We believe the traditional communications solution provider community, those partners, will love the way we’re organizing this new team. They will love the way we’re enabling them to sell new technologies to their end-user customers.

Is this part of that convergence move to get ScanSource partners to add more services to their hardware sales that we talked about last year at the ScanSource Partner First conference?

It is. We felt like we were asking partners to start a convergence within their business to sell these technologies. And yet, within ScanSource, they were having to deal with two sales teams, an Intelisys sales team and a ScanSource Specialty sales team. We’re combining those starting with our communications area which traditionally sells all of our traditional telecom equipment, the Mitel, ShoreTel, Avaya, Polycom. All those partners that are selling hardware and cloud can now deal with one sales rep as we bring this to life. This is brand new.

Will that move be expanded in the future?

We expect it to be expanded because we believe it will grow our business organically by doing this.

Now this is targeted at your Intelisys community, right?

It is. It’s basically saying we’ve got Intelisys telecom agents who’ve never sold hardware. We want to help them, and we also want ScanSource partners, especially those who have only bought hardware from us, to start selling Intelisys products like Ring and Zoom and even Microsoft. They maybe have only been selling hardware. We want to show them how they could sell more, because their end users are buying all of this and they may not be selling it.

Could you see a day where ScanSource combines Intelisys and its Specialty business and treats it as a single community?

I don’t know. It could be. I think this is an early approach. We’ll still have two separate teams within ScanSource, but each one will be now able to help each other sell across the two segments, and this will be an example of what we believe end users want. End users want a total solution. And let’s see if we can pull this off, because our partners are also asking for it. We want to make it easier to do this. We can still have two different segments, but have teams that can do both.

Another thing we discussed last year was the idea of partner communities, something that ScanSource didn’t have in the past. Have you made any progress on that front?

Not as much as I think we still can do in the future. And part of it is, there’s still an association with these partners where they operate differently. For example, this year we had a traditional ScanSource Specialty event in Arlington, Texas, and then we had in Austin, Texas the Intelisys event. They were three months apart, two different groups, not a lot of partners from the other side at each one. So I think we still have a way to go on all that. We’re working on creating a community that would include both of them.

What caused ScanSource’s second fiscal quarter revenue to be less than expected?

I think the big story was the large deals that typically we would have expected in the second quarter didn’t happen as we would want them to. What we heard from our partners was that large deals got pushed out and were broken up into smaller deliverable segments. They’re not canceled, but they have been pushed out, or they have been broken up and delivered over more time than originally expected.

Is that something you’re expecting to continue going forward in the rest of the fiscal year? ScanSource lowered its revenue guidance for the full year to $3.0 billion to $3.1 billion compared to earlier guidance of $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion.

Yeah, we did lower the guidance. But what we’re really reflecting in that guidance is that we’ll actually see large deals our second half. Actually, if you take the second half as part of the annual guidance, it suggests growth in the second half year-over-year. So the low guidance includes growth in the second half.

So the lower guidance reflects the issues you talked about in the first half of the year?

Yeah, it’s really saying, ‘Hey, we got a slower start on the year than we thought, and we won’t recover all of it in this fiscal year.’ That’s right.

What is ScanSource seeing in the macroenvironment in terms of how the Intelisys and the Specialized partners will fare?

There are two things. One of the macros is the large deal environment that we just talked about. The second macro, is more on the hardware. Everybody’s talking about memory shortages coming, memory prices going up. We haven’t seen it impact our business yet, but we’re aware that that could happen. We’ve had a lot of questions about what’s happening, what are we hearing from our suppliers, what’s going to happen over the next year. And this issue was in all the financial news the last few weeks.

So what are you hearing from your suppliers?

Well, basically they’re saying, stay tuned. Lead times haven’t changed. As you know, we inventory a lot of product. We have only six inventory turns. So we try to forecast well with our suppliers what we’re going to need, and then we stock the inventory for our partners, and what happens is it’s very important that we understand lead times. If you recall, back during Covid, lead times started to extend, and that made it harder for us to forecast how much inventory we would need. Now, lead times haven’t changed, but we’re getting indications from them, just from listening to the industry, that that could change as we look out. And so that’s what we’re aware of, and we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure our partners get the inventory they need. But it also means that there could be price increases coming.

I can’t imagine there not being price increases this year.

Again, we’re saying we believe that may happen, and we’ll just have to see how this year rolls out. And again, our belief is that’s what makes distribution just so hard to predict and forecast. I guess the story I’m trying to suggest is our business model is doing great, and our teams have executed with excellence. But we were disappointed with the quarter because the large deals didn’t come in as we had thought they would.

For the distribution business in general, are you pretty bullish on the distribution industry, or are there some issues that partners need to be aware of?

Well, we’re very bullish because we’ve given three-year goals out for the last, I don’t know, two years or so, saying, ‘Hey, we believe that we’re in a growth industry with opportunity for our business and frankly other distributors to grow.’ And what’s driving it is our belief that end users are needing more complex technologies, and we’re in those areas, such as what we’re doing with Intelisys, with advanced networking, with some of the call center changes, where you’ve got CX or customer experience opportunities. You’ve got AI coming in. We believe these advanced technologies are important for end users, but they’re not things you can buy at Amazon. These are technologies that require a channel. And if there’s going to be a large channel, there’s going to need to be distributors. It’s only if the channel partners selling to users become very small will the need for distribution go away or be reduced. And that’s not happening.

What kinds of investments has ScanSource made in terms of bringing AI to your partners?

We’re trying to make sure we understand how to use it internally first. At ScanSource, we’ve standardized on using Copilot as a way to introduce AI to our employees so they can understand what the impact can be. And now we’re starting to bring on AI products from our current suppliers. It’s more on the Intelisys side right now where we’ve got call center technologies that are incorporating AI into their solutions. I believe that’s where we’ll see the impact first, and that’s why, when we look at creating this converged communications team, we believe some of the solutions they’ll be selling will incorporate AI. That’ll be the place we want to focus.

Given that your partner community, particularly on the Intelisys side, but also on the Specialty Business side, tends to be a little bit more conservative than the typical partner community, do you see them ready to embrace AI, or do you still have to do a lot of evangelization?

I would say our group is very much focused on industry-specific and solution-specific products and services. So maybe what is different about them is they’re not typically just selling horizontal IT technology products. So for example, they’re not selling data center. Most of them are not selling servers and laptops. What they are selling is very specific solutions, computer solutions that have specific business outcomes. So we may not have partners on the early stage of AI selling the actual compute. But I think as AI becomes more of a solution, our group will actually do very well. I think they will be very well positioned, and we will make sure we have the right education and sales enablement for our community. So I think we’re on the right trajectory for our partner community right now with AI. I really do.

We’re still early in calendar 2026. What are your strategic priorities for the rest of this year?

Well, we believe we can be more aggressive at winning market share. We believe that there’s opportunity for our value proposition to win. We’ve added more sales resources, so we expect to gain market share this year. That’s a real focus for our company.

And when you say added more sales resources, can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done in that area?

Across the company, with this new converged communications team, we’ve got new opportunities where some people will be promoted into some of those positions, but we’re also looking to recruit and hire people who want to help us on the sales side. We believe there are sales opportunities in distribution as we look out at 2026 that we’ll meet. And some of these, by the way, are going to come from some of the acquisitions that we’ve made and some of the acquisitions that we expect to make in ‘26. We believe that we’re going to acquire some sales capabilities this year just like we did last year.

When you say acquired sales capabilities last year, can you give me an example?

Yeah, we acquired a company last fall called DataXoom. DataXoom was a fairly small developer of two-way mobility technology, maybe 22 or so employees, I can’t remember. That’s a business that needs more sales help, so we’ll be adding sales capability to that team as an example.

Anything else you think we need to know?

We’re excited about 2026. And we do think that for pressures such as memory and large deals, we’ve seen this movie before. We understand how to compete in a market where products are short and there’s opportunity ahead. So we feel very good about our opportunity.