True confession time — I was once a reseller. That means I well remember the business struggles to retain customers and margins and the frustration with traditional distributors. That is at least in part why we in Direct Distribution have, we believe, a different mind-set in dealing with our reseller customers. For a start, our primary business objective since setting up in 2009 is to buy as well as we can in order to pass on a fair share of those savings so that our customers can add an extra few points to their bottom line.
One of the things that means is that we are not tied to any vendors or vendor marketing schemes. While we stock the world’s leading ICT brands such as HP IBM Lenovo & Cisco we source globally so that our pricing is always competitive. We also source EoL, obsolete or hard to find parts. That is combined with deliveries on time and service level agreements with our customers. Our staff are highly experienced and understand the business needs of resellers, from the local two-person enterprise to some of Ireland’s best known national names.
We also have a team of qualified technical specialists who work with our customers to ensure the end user customers are happy with their equipment and solutions. In short we are trying to be a distributor partner rather than a traditional warehouse wholesaler. For example, very often our resellers need additional technical expertise or experience to specify a system configuration for customers. That is increasingly important because our main business is in broadly mid-range hardware such as servers, SANs and other infrastructure components. We will consult and work with resellers to produce a solution that will give them peace of mind in selling and implementing and ensure the end users are happy. The aim is always to preserve their professional reputation — and their margins.
We will consult and work with resellers to produce a solution that will give them peace of mind in selling and implementing and ensure the end users are happy
Although our main product lines are in that mid-range, we are also national distributors for Chip PC thin client devices and also for Colt Telecom cloud and hosting services through our reseller partners. A surprisingly successful recent line of business is in professionally refurbished and guaranteed laptops. These are all high-spec machines, typically Intel i5 or better and brands including IBM/Lenovo, Dell and Toshiba.
One of the major complaints by smaller resellers about traditional distributors, both Irish and UK, is that their business terms are overly strict and inflexible. Often a credit account will not be available for small firms. We aim to work with our resellers to look at the overall value proposition, the end customer and what it will take to get the deal over the line. We are also looking to start relationships with new resellers, particularly in regard to the Colt Telecom and Cloud business. Our Cloud offering includes SME and enterprise solutions ready for the reseller to deploy.
We now have over 250 resellers on our books, a steadily increasing base, from all over the 32 counties but with a slight concentration in the greater Dublin area. So we must be doing something right.
Macdara Wrynne is Managing Director of Direct Distribution
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers