We all know the old joke about ‘military intelligence’ being an oxymoron but what are we to make of a term like ‘market intelligence’? Obviously, the markets aren’t intelligent as such but it should be possible to glean information about a particular market and use it to do better in a specific sector or area.
Assuming there is such a thing as market intelligence, the next question would be to ask how this can be deployed nearer to home in the channel to help partners sell products or services more effectively. Let’s start with the naysayers. Take the channel partner who says that vendors often have valuable information that they will give to their own sales force but they won’t share it with the channel. The same goes for competitive information. They may well have it and they may well share it with their sales force but they don’t spread it to their channel partners. And even if they do, it’s often a very watered down version of it.
"There’s a big line between the vendor and the channel," our hypothetical partner claims. "The only time they give you feedback is with something you know already. You might get strong stats at the beginning of the year at a channel partner day, but it’s normally when an external company like IDC has already provided them."
To his mind, there isn’t a formal feedback channel and it’s hardly surprising when a vendor’s business partner could be selling several competing technologies. No wonder vendors won’t share. Imagine Sir Alex Ferguson having a player on his team that also kits out for Arsene Wenger and Roberto Mancini. I somehow don’t think he would be as free and easy with his information about how to try and beat Arsenal or Man City as he would be with someone that only plays for his team. The same goes for vendors: it’s easier to share sensitive information with their own directly employed sales force than it is with channel partners.
Volume
On a practical level, it might also just be too damn hard to do. Some vendors have so many product lines that there’s just too much to churn through and there’s so much volume that they can struggle to come up with accurate information on anything.
That’s one view, but there are other more positive voices. Paul Bale, marketing manager at Sharptext, says the distributor already provides intelligence to reseller partners and to its vendors. "We have 20 salespeople on the phone every day to upwards of 70 to 100 customers each. Part of their role is to advise their customers on the best choice for their purchase." So that qualifies as a kind of intelligence in terms of helping customers to make the right choice.
"Our salespeople attend ongoing training across all the brands we represent and, in turn, we distil the information to be given out to customers through webinars, face to face meetings, briefings, e-shots and mailings. For the future, we’ll be adding short videos as well." In this instance, Sharptext is acting as a conduit for information to partners but it also applies some intelligence in terms of framing that information in way that works for partners. And that’s not all.
"Naturally, we also receive feedback from customers, which we discuss with the vendors locally to inform their plans and portfolios as well," Bale adds. "We feel this is an important value add for us, as it is based on the relationships we hold with our customers."
Some people of a more cynical bent might argue this merely part and parcel of a distributor’s job. And they would be right. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a level of intelligence being supplied to partners about the market.
Naturally, Michael Conway, director at Renaissance, is quick to draw a distinction between the role of broad-line distributors and specialist, value added businesses like his own. Broad-line distributors do a traditional job and do very little else. If a product is fairly commoditised, it’s the vendor that has the focus on the market and does all the work around the sales messaging and value add.
But value added distributors are different and "the key difference is in terms of market intelligence and understanding". For a distributor like Renaissance, that means working with its resellers and helping them to differentiate themselves. "We’re adding a lot of value about what the marketplace is. We’ve developed to deliver the type of solution that the market and resellers need at this stage."
For example, when it comes to managed services or the cloud, people talk about them a lot but "they’re not sure what value added solutions they can deliver. We spend a lot of time saying this is how you deliver a package and develop your business, how you can add services that your customers need and require and be perceived as adding a lot of value and understanding a customer’s needs as the requirement changes".
Nuts and bolts
From the perspective of a company like Renaissance, the market intelligence in this instance is about helping resellers to understand what the market trends are, what products and services they can sell, how they position them into their customer base and which products and services are most appropriate for them.
There’s a role for helping resellers to understand how a particular technology can be developed and sold. "A lot of resellers come from a technical background," Conway explains. "They have their heads in the nuts and bolts of something" so they might not understand the opportunity it presents.
Part of the role of a value added distributor like Renaissance is to spend time with resellers and get an understanding of where they are, what works for them and what doesn’t. And if the distributor develops an understanding of how something does work for a particular reseller, it can get a better understanding of how it can work for others.
Then there’s the intelligence that can be delivered in terms of how a product can be sold in the Irish market or whether it can be sold here at all. "There are lots and lots of products, solutions and opportunities, but when you look at them in the cold light of day, you can say that’s relevant for Ireland and that’s not," Conway says. That’s where an indigenous distributor can bring an understanding about a particular technology’s relevance to the Irish market that a US-based vendor would never be able to match. "If I went off to a non-Irish market, like the midwest in the US, I wouldn’t have an understanding of what the structure of the market was until I had spent time on the ground understanding the types of business there, their requirements and their specific issues," Conway argues.
He says exhibitions like Infosec illustrate only too well the shortcomings in vendor awareness of their own technology. "You can go there and know that virtually every stand has a really good technology, but I guarantee that at least a third have absolutely no messaging whatsoever, they have no idea what it can do for people because they’re not looking at a business requirement or a business solution. Others may have identified what their technology can do but the messaging might be inappropriate in an Irish context."
It’s in those types of circumstances where a value added distributor can step in and help the vendor to deliver the right message for Ireland in a clear and straightforward manner and that’s simple enough for resellers to pass on to customers in terms of solving a business problem or meeting a business requirement – and generate a profitable revenue in the process.
Local heroes
Vendors need to understand that messages need to be tweaked or changed for specific markets such as Ireland. For instance, a reseller in New York might have the scale and customer base to support the investment to become skilled up to a very high level for a particular brand but it’s much harder, if not impossible, for resellers in Ireland to do the same because it doesn’t make sense in the market. "Major brands understand we will put an Irish partner programme in place," Conway reveals. "We do get some that have a global message and we do try to fly under the radar to a degree. God help us from the global message from a product manager living in Silicon Valley with a single focus on how a product must be delivered and sold."
Dermot Hayden, sales manager for Sophos Ireland (one of Renaissance’s vendors), is suitably appreciative of the efforts of its distributor. It uses Renaissance to provide information to resellers and to work out which type of resellers it needs to target for specific sectors or products. "We very much look at a sector and decide what resellers we want to be working with," he says. It might want to know which ones are focused on the SMB market or enterprise customers, those that target a particular geographic part of the country and operate in areas Sophos is weak in and look at how to get them on board.
"That’s where having a distributor like Renaissance is a huge benefit because it knows the market, it knows which resellers are focused on which markets, which ones we should be targeting and what their allegiances are," he states. "We rely on Renaissance’s knowledge of the market."
Sophos has a lot of local autonomy and feedback from Hayden, and Renaissance can help to produce promotions, campaigns and solutions that are best suited to the Irish market.
This type of intelligence is of great importance to vendors and partners alike, but there are other things distributors can provide. A good example is provided by COMPUTERLINKS which offers research support to resellers via reports generated by its CRM system. Country manager Paul Kelly says many resellers find this type of knowledge useful when making decisions about which markets to operate in. He stresses it is a standard part of the service the distributor offers resellers and "a strong example" of the value add it offers the channel.
One of the things it can do is create reports for resellers based upon their own sales trends. Many don’t have the resources to break down their sales data, even to whether sales are from renewals or new business, "so our data can help them to hone in on where their sales successes have been". It can also break down individual products into subsets. Kelly gives the example of where an analysis of firewall vendor sales might show VPN was the main focus or that end point security has been the fastest growing area.
The other type of information it can offer "is general analysis across the board, such as looking at specific technology areas spanning different countries". For example, if the reports reveal nearly a third of the market is represented by firewalls, VPN and IPS technology, analysis across different periods of time can compare those figures with previous years and show resellers which markets have been growing and which technology areas are the ones to watch.
Kelly stresses that because the data in the reports comes directly from the distributor’s resellers, confidentiality is really important. So COMPUTERLINKS shares the data by using graphical representations such as pie charts and bar graphs rather than individual reseller sales. But when it meets with individual resellers, it can feed back their own data and tailor its more general analysis to their specific areas of interest.
He claims that because the company is a global distributor with a wide breadth of technologies in its portfolio, "we are able to provide timely and accurate information that may be difficult to find elsewhere". And this is the type of information individual vendors couldn’t provide "because they don’t have the means to compare themselves against other vendors".
Wastage
The ability to provide information on other markets, including the UK and Germany, makes it possible to compare the Irish market to those countries that are moving faster in certain technology areas, and gives Irish resellers the ability "to make informed decisions about future investments".
Resellers can react to the intelligence the distributor has given them by ensuring their sales staff and engineers are skilled up in growth areas. "It can also be invaluable when making decisions on which new technologies to invest in to avoid wasting time and resources in areas with less potential," he adds.
And that’s what good market intelligence is all about, even if getting it can be a difficult process.
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