Michael O’Hara, managing director at Data Solutions, believes the principles articulated by Martin are likely to form part of the rules of engagement that every good distributor or vendor “should follow in conducting business with its channel partners. Indeed, any business would be wise to use these principles as part of their go to market strategy as they allow a business to build a solid and sustainable platform to grow and hopefully be profitable over many years of operation”.
“The attitude was ‘resellers should be almost privileged to sell our fantastic software, they work for us’. That’s outdated and wrong.” – James Vyvyan, Sophos
But he says over and above any principles that are in place, “trust is the biggest factor in building a sustainable channel ecosystem. Once trust is established, vendors can focus on positioning their technologies and the benefits they offer to potential channel partners. It is much easier to get the channel motivated to make investments in technical and sales training and to promote vendors’ products to their customer databases when trust is there”.
From Data Solutions’ perspective, O’Hara says resellers rely on the distributor to provide the best service in a timely manner on a daily basis. They trust the distributor “with sensitive and competitive information on prospective opportunities, which they know will be safely guarded by our team. Having a clear and focused business plan is also key, as this helps ensure the Data Solutions team is on message and working together to achieve the business’ ultimate goals”.
Win-win
With more than 20 years experience dealing with the channel on behalf of a number of vendors (and two years working as sales director at one Ireland’s largest channel partners), Liam Halpin, general manager at Dell Ireland, boils a win-win channel ecosystem down to a number of key ingredients:
1. A portfolio that allows partners to meet their customers’ needs and grow their business in areas where the partner is working as a specialist or as a generalist
2. A vendor that is easy to do business with and quick to respond
3. A comprehensive deal registration and engagement model
4. Rebates that reward partners for investment in business growth, technical focus and specialisations
He says a channel is only successful if there is a good split between the business the partner works on collaboratively with the vendor’s sales or pre-sales people and the business the partner develops using its own sales and pre-sales resources.
From a customer’s perspective, the combination of the vendor and the channel partner should add more value to the process. “The more successful this ‘better together’ experience is for the customer, the more likely it is for the partner and the vendor to replicate and grow each other’s business,” Halpin observes.
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