Success

The principles of success

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25 May 2015

Many of the most successful relationships rely on shared values and mutual benefits to succeed and flourish. The IT industry is no different. Over the years, some technology vendors have evolved a set of principles to underpin their engagement with channel partners. These principles are designed to keep revenue and profit to a maximum and conflict to a minimum.

Red Hat vice president of North America partner sales D. Robert Martin made a good stab at trying to articulate these principles in a blog post in April this year. He began by stressing the importance of channel partners to the vendor. Without them, “there would be no room for growth or future opportunities. Without those partners and the close relationships we have with them, there would be no Red Hat as we know it today”.

Martin then outlined seven principles which had helped to bring the vendor “enormous success over the years” and increase partner bookings from 54% of the vendor’s overall bookings in 2009 to 68% in 2015. Channel partners are unlikely to be surprised by any of them, but those of a more jaundiced disposition might wonder if some of their suppliers would struggle to recognise a few of the principles.

At which point, it is probably worth listing Martin’s seven principles for Red Hat’s successful channel strategy:

1.    Embrace and understand that our success is directly tied to our partner relationships
2.    Select partners based on synergies, and always choose quality over quantity
3.    Maintain a clear and consistent strategy
4.    Be business plan driven
5.    Make it easy to work with us
6.    Always provide excellent enablement and support
7.    Maintain a maniacal focus on the competition

Martin certainly appears to be a believer in the effectiveness of the principles, predicting that the vendor’s channel organisation will “continue to be the engine for Red Hat’s new customer acquisitions” over the next couple of years.

Privilege
While James Vyvyan, Sophos regional vice president for UK & Ireland, agrees that principles are an important part of a successful channel strategy, he can’t resist adding: “I suspect that most resellers will tell you that any principles are mainly around maximising the amount of money that the vendor makes. The secret [to success] is if you can maximise the amount of money resellers make. It’s about having a real partnership.”

From his own experience, Vyvyan can recall working in some vendor organisations where “the attitude was ‘resellers should be almost privileged to sell our fantastic software, they work for us’. That’s outdated and wrong”.

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