Selling to Verizon

Verizon has guided to capital expenditures of 16.0 billion to 16.5 billion dollars for 2026, and that budget now has to cover a larger company: the Frontier acquisition closed on 20 January 2026 and consolidates into Verizon's results from that date. Verizon generated 138.2 billion dollars of revenue in 2025.

Read those numbers together and you have the selling environment. Verizon is spending less across a bigger asset base. In November 2025 the company announced it would reduce its workforce by more than 13,000 people, the largest cut in its history, and the same announcement said it would significantly reduce outsourced and other outside labour expense. If you sell software or services, you are a line in that category. In 2026 a pitch built on new capability has to survive a review whose stated purpose is removing cost. A pitch built on cost takeout, with the arithmetic attached, is the one that survives it.

How the buying process actually runs

Registration runs through Ariba and Verizon's own supplier portal. Suppliers create an account on the Ariba Network, submit a registration request to Verizon and complete a registration questionnaire, with supporting documentation handled through Verizon's vSource supplier system. Vetting covers export compliance, financial health and safety, and it happens before any commercial conversation is formalised.

Registration is explicitly not a pipeline. Verizon runs a Small Business Supplier Accelerator committing 5 billion dollars over five years to American small business suppliers, with regional seminars, faster payment terms and modified insurance and indemnification requirements. Verizon's own page for that programme states that qualification and participation do not guarantee current or future contracting opportunities. That is unusually direct, and it is the correct way to read every supplier registration process in this industry.

CPNI is the requirement that makes telecoms different. Verizon is a common carrier subject to Section 222 of the Communications Act, which governs customer proprietary network information: who a subscriber called, from where, for how long, on which service, and the related billing detail. In April 2024 the Federal Communications Commission issued a forfeiture order against Verizon of 46,901,250 dollars for failing to reasonably safeguard that information after location data reached aggregators and onward resellers, and the Second Circuit upheld it. The practical consequence for a vendor is that anything touching subscriber records, network telemetry, call detail or location inherits contractual CPNI obligations, and the legal review of those obligations is slower and more adversarial than the generic data processing addendum you have signed elsewhere. Budget for it as a phase, not a formality.

The purchase originates in an operating unit. Verizon reports two segments. Verizon Consumer Group produced roughly 106.8 billion dollars of revenue in 2025 and Verizon Business Group roughly 29.1 billion, about 21 percent of consolidated revenue, with the business segment itself split into Enterprise and Public Sector, Business Markets and Other, and Wholesale. Network build, product development and security sit in a separate organisation again. Your deal belongs to one of those, and getting that wrong costs a quarter.

Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs

You will not be selling to these people. Their remit tells you which part of Verizon your deal sits inside, and whose priorities it has to align with two or three levels down.

Tony Skiadas is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Hans Vestberg, the previous chief executive, is serving as special adviser through 4 October 2026. Names taken from Verizon's own leadership page, verified 12 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.

You cannot sell into this account from the bottom

Verizon employed approximately 89,900 people at the end of 2025, before the Frontier headcount arrived and before the announced reductions completed. That is a smaller organisation than its revenue suggests, and it means fewer people with discretionary budget, not more.

A deal that justifies the cost of selling here runs into the millions a year, and anything touching the network runs to tens of millions across a multi-year term. In a declared cost reduction programme, approval authority moves up rather than down. The thresholds that a director could sign off in 2023 now attract a review. Aiming your outreach where replies are easiest is aiming precisely where the authority is not.

The layer that matters is below the public names, and it is unusually hard to map here

Verizon's published leadership page lists nine executives. As of this verification date it does not list a chief information officer, which tells you something real: at a carrier, the technology estate is split between the network organisation and the IT function supporting consumer and business operations, and the two buy differently, on different cycles, against different risk frameworks. A seller who cannot say which of the two owns the problem is not going to be routed correctly by anyone inside.

Two further complications are specific to 2026. The Frontier integration means Verizon currently runs duplicate systems and duplicate vendor relationships across a fibre footprint it is still absorbing, so the owner of a given platform may be an open question inside the company, not just outside it. And the restructuring announced in November 2025 moved or removed a large number of the exact mid-level sponsors a vendor relies on. Any contact map built before December 2025 should be treated as stale.

The board is a published second-degree map

Nine directors were elected at the 2026 annual meeting. This is public, checkable, and almost nobody uses it as a routing table.

• Dan Schulman, Chief Executive Officer of Verizon, formerly President and CEO of PayPal, a Verizon director since 2018.
• Mark T. Bertolini, Chair of the Verizon board, currently Chief Executive Officer of Oscar Health, formerly chairman and CEO of Aetna.
• Shellye L. Archambeau, formerly Chief Executive Officer of MetricStream, also a director of Roper Technologies and Lineage.
• Roxanne S. Austin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Austin Investment Advisors, also a director of AbbVie, CrowdStrike and Freshworks.
• Vittorio Colao, formerly Chief Executive of Vodafone Group and formerly Italian Minister for Innovation, Digital Transition and Space, now Vice Chairman for EMEA at General Atlantic.
• Caroline Litchfield, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Merck.
• Jennifer Mann, Executive Vice President and President, North America Operating Unit, of The Coca-Cola Company.
• Laxman Narasimhan, formerly Chief Executive Officer of Starbucks and formerly Chief Executive Officer of Reckitt.
• Carol B. Tomé, Chief Executive Officer of United Parcel Service, formerly Chief Financial Officer of The Home Depot.

Read that as a seller. If anyone in your network is senior at Oscar Health, Roper, Lineage, AbbVie, CrowdStrike, Freshworks, General Atlantic, Merck, Coca-Cola or UPS, there is a two hop path to a Verizon director. Colao is worth singling out: a former Vodafone group chief executive on the board means telecoms operating judgement is present in the room, which raises the bar on vague network claims and rewards precise ones.

The other routes in, and one that does not exist

There is no large formal Verizon alumni programme of the kind some banks run. Verizon publishes a retiree information site, and that is the extent of the official channel. The workaround is bigger than the thing it replaces: Verizon is an accumulation of acquired companies, and each one left a population of people who still know who stayed. Bell Atlantic, GTE, MCI, Alltel, XO Communications, Terremark, Fleetmatics, TracFone and now Frontier are all alumni pools attached to this account. Most vendors have never checked whether anyone in their own building came from one of them.

Verizon is customer, competitor and channel at the same time. Verizon Business Group sells managed network, security and IoT services to enterprises, which for many software vendors are the same buyers you are targeting. That is a genuine risk in a partnership conversation, and it is also the opening: the Verizon Partner Network exists precisely so that third parties can co-sell alongside Verizon into those accounts. Deciding early which of the three relationships you are actually proposing saves you from a meeting where everyone in the room thinks it is one of the other two.

Carrier customers and integrators. Telecoms is a small industry at senior level and people move between operators. A champion at another carrier who has watched your product work carries more weight than anyone on your payroll. The integrators already embedded in Verizon's network and IT programmes can route you to the team with the problem, and often want to.

Finding which of these paths actually exists in your company's relationships is what relationship intelligence is for. The map is usually already there. Nobody has queried it.

And then you have to get to your own connector

Suppose the strongest path runs through one of your own directors who serves alongside a Verizon director on a third board. That is about as good as it gets, and it is close to unrepeatable. You have to get that person to prioritise it, write something credible, and spend a piece of a relationship built over years on you. Ask twice in a quarter and you will not be asked again.

The same applies at every level. Asking a customer champion to introduce you to a peer at Verizon is asking them to lend you their professional credibility. Do it badly, too often, or without giving them something they can forward unedited, and you lose the relationship that made the introduction possible. Most companies have no view of who else internally is already asking the same connector this quarter, which is how two reps end up approaching the same director about the same account in the same month.

Three rules for the introduction itself

Ask for the operating unit, not the company. An introduction to whoever owns vendor consolidation inside Verizon Business Group is actionable. An introduction to Verizon is not. Name the buying committee you think you need before you ask.

Write the paragraph your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch, and if they have to, they will not send it. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.

A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still complete Ariba registration, security review and CPNI contracting, and you still need more than one thread inside the account to survive a reorganisation. What a warm path buys you is a real conversation with someone who has the problem and the budget, several months earlier than cold outreach would produce one.

See the warm paths into Verizon

Everything above describes the problem: CPNI obligations that follow any vendor touching subscriber records. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.

Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Verizon, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.