RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 47

	Page 1
	Page 2
	Page 3

by William Van Winkle

RAM Award: Best Sales Force

Everybody needs help, but some vendors are better about providing sales help to their partners than others. Which vendor has an exceptional inside sales staff that always gives you exactly what you need to close the deal? How about the outside sales rep who not only educates you in your showroom but goes to bat for you with your clients? Got a vendor that can even offer you both? We want to know which vendor has the best sales force in the industry.

Winner: NEC Display Solutions of America

Some product lines and vendors seem to age well. Fine wines come to mind. Many of us frequent the same jewelers, physicians, and tailors our parents did. In an industry that thrives on change and novelty, there’s still a lot to be said for the benefits of experience and constancy. This must be why NEC Display Solutions captured top honors in our Best Sales Force Award.

“We have a very experienced, channel-centric sales organization,” says vice president of sales Clark Brown. “I’ve been with NEC for 17 years. Most of our senior executives have been over 15 years with the company, and this filters down into our sales organization. Most of those guys have five years in the channel or more. Even the youngest person has been out there calling on our channel customers.”

We all have dealt with sales departments that work off of glossy spec sheets, and when you’re in the field with a vendor, the last thing you want to hear him say is, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” A good sales force exists to fill in the blanks left by product pages and Google searches. Particularly in an upscale, high-margin product area such as large displays, expertise is critical. If your vendor doesn’t have the people to back you up, the worst thing that can happen is you actually win the bid, because the mistakes you make in the pre-sale and installation phase will kill you down the road.

Experienced salespeople doesn’t mean a stodgy organization, though. You don’t get huge on a brand like Multi- Sync and then rest on your laurels for two decades. NEC’s sales staff are constantly having to update their knowledge and methods, and the company’s sales priorities and resources shift accordingly.

“This past year,” says Brown, “we added four people dedicated to some of the solutions sales opportunities. Some of our large-sized LCDs are being combined with total solutions for the channel. So we’re trying to educate the channel on how they can go out and sell digital signage and digital advertising types of opportunities. We’ve also segmented our channel sales arms into distribution and others strictly on resellers. We’ve added more bodies on the reseller side in this past year and really tried to work with our top partners and give them higher touch ratios, getting out to visit them more often. We’ve also expanded our inside sales operations for resellers, too, in an effort to have total coverage of the reseller community.”

NEC monitors may have gone through several company name changes over the years, but the product quality has remained top notch. Today, NEC LCDs represent one of the best margin prospects around in the display space on selling price, installation revenue, and manageability services. If you didn’t vote for NEC here and haven’t sampled the advantages of the company’s sales group, you’re missing out.

Runners-Up: Intel, Microsoft

On one hand, selling Intel is a no-brainer. Bald guys in blue face paint and the catchy four notes of that commercial ditty handle half of the sale before you even open your mouth. Selling Intel is not the problem. Selling an Intel solution is. Solutions require understanding what Intel pieces are needed for a task set and how those pieces will work with other non-Intel pieces. This applies as much to an Itanium 2 server as a a low-end Celeron notebook. Fortunately, Intel is one of the best in the industry at providing training, not just on the products themselves but how those products can turn into profitable service opportunities. Whether it’s Web-based, at event breakout groups, or sitting across a lunch table one-on-one, Intel salespeople repeatedly demonstrate that they do whatever is necessary to educate channel partners so they can do a lot more than just sell chips.

And really, only two words are needed to explain why voters clicked on Microsoft as a sales force winner: Action Pack. Sure, Microsoft has legions of excellent salespeople both in-house and in the field, and these are invaluable assistants when it comes to crafting client solutions. But if you want to understand the breadth and interweaving of Microsoft’s many offerings so that you can sell them in the first place, you need the Action Pack, which bundles one NFR copy of essentially everything into an ultra-affordable package and then piles on gobs of educational and marketing materials so that, when you’re ready, you can start passing on your newly acquired knowledge for a profit.

RAM Award: Best Marketing Buddy

You’re a PC reseller, not an advertising agency. Marketing is another area where resellers can benefit immensely from a vendor that gives them the tools they need to lure in new business with maximum efficiency and lowest cost. Who’s your best marketing buddy?

Winner: Intel

Everyone makes mistakes. Most of us hate to admit it when we do, but the smart ones fess up, learn, and move on. Industry leaders are no less immune to this than the rest of us. This is why we were so impressed to see Intel come forward and explain why it felt resellers had voted it into our Best Marketing Buddy slot. This was not a tale of wealth and influence but one of finding new energy through fixing problems.

“We weren’t talking to VARs,” explains Intel director of North America channel marketing Shirley Turner. “They weren’t understanding where we were going technologically. And our friends at IBM and HP weren’t talking about it because that stuff isn’t a differentiator. We thought those guys would be passing through our messages as part of their product sales, and then we discovered four years later, ehh—wrong! I finally had some old VAR networking buddies come and ask why we didn’t talk to them anymore. We just didn’t know what they wanted to know, and they said, ‘We want to know where Intel is going so we can be there, too.’ They were getting blindsided by customers who would see Centrino commercials, call up their VAR wanting an explanation of it, and the VAR wouldn’t know. This was years ago, but the point is that the information wasn’t flushing through to the VARs, and VARs are 50% of the channel.”

This revelation played a large part in how Intel shaped its channel program, bringing marketing resources to the fore in an effort to make sure that all partners were on the same page pursuing the same broad technology goals.

“We have created from scratch a whole new set of tools and collateral for the VAR market,” says Turner. “Because what helps a system builder sell a box is not what helps a VAR sell a solution today. Things like, what are the benefits of Hyper-Threading technology to a school? How is Advanced Management technology going to help you with the banking or medical office you’re selling to? The program is really about how you sell in verticals.”

Naturally, not all of Intel’s channel marketing efforts are going toward VAR education. Intel has campaigns based around the digital home, getting into the server market with Xeon, and a whole “Build Your Own Notebook” marketing kit, which even includes flyer templates and artwork for T-shirt designs.

Runners-Up: Microsoft, Samsung

In a photo finish behind Intel, Microsoft crossed the line with its own sweeping array of marketing savvy. It goes without saying that with so many resellers pushing Microsoft products, competition for the premium marketing resources is intense. Fortunately, though, the company provides some fairly impressive marketing help for the masses, too. This includes the Custom Collateral Tool, a mass mailing campaign partners can access online. Using templates and mailing lists (either your own or rented), resellers can generate and mail co-branded materials designed to link the partner with current Microsoft marketing efforts. Or there are the Partner Enablement Programs (PEPs), an extension of the go-to-market campaigns. PEPs are focused around certain product groupings. For example, the Connected Productivity PEP blends Office Professional 2003, SharePoint, OneNote 2003, and Windows Mobile, equipping resellers with the knowledge, software, and strategies they need to build client mobility solutions. There’s much more where that came from, but Microsoft continues to prove that the deeper it develops its products, the more opportunities open up for resellers.

Once again, Samsung shows that its killer Power Partner Program is good for more than cash incentives and major prize drawings. Co-op money accrued through the program can be applied toward traditional media (print, radio, etc.) advertising, fax and email blasts, catalog costs, Web banner advertising, brochures, outside training events, demo units, and more. Many manufacturers have either cut their co-op programs for small- to mid-size resellers or greatly curtailed how the funds can be used. Samsung’s willingness to not restrict resellers in their marketing has struck a chord that hopefully other vendors will hear.

Key Channel Player:
Phil McKay
Gartner Vision Events

As the waters seem to have settled over Comdex and CES remains a round peg trying to fill a square IT hole, who would have thought that the best and brightest event(s) for the channel would have come from a stats and analysis house? And yet in a way it makes sense. Gartner has always been about helping people to leverage technology. Facts about industry trends are one way to do this. Educating people on new technologies and matching up resellers and vendors so that both can grow are simply alternative means to the same end.

Gartner’s System Builder Summit and VARVision events (now IT ChannelVision) have become channel staples. However, Gartner has additional Summit and Vision events aimed at filling in every opening from top to bottom, the most recent of which is Small Business Vision, which debuted in 2005 as an eight-location road show seeking to address the needs of the reseller “masses” that so often go ignored.

Working with Gartner senior global director Eric Lesonsky, Phil McKay has emerged as the point man entrusted with fulfilling Gartner’s channel event agenda. Perhaps more than anyone else in the industry, McKay has done more in the past year to unite the many disparate groups within our business and help them cooperate more effectively and profitably. His passion for the job is infectious, and we’re certain this year’s Key Channel Player will accomplish even more in the year to come.

RAM: What is your goal for the Vision events?

PM: We’ve tried to align all of the channel partners together and have a community, not just an event. I mean, we’re just a spoke in the wheel of that community, but we can be a catalyst to bringing that community together because we organize that face-to-face part of it. We’ve gone out to the key partners—and that means the vendor community, the associations with NASBA and CompTIA—and found the best partners that want to be part of growing something bigger than what they are. It’s really not personal. It’s about the greater good for all.

RAM: The industry has plenty of road shows. Why are yours different?

PM: We’ve emphasized being open. We couldn’t have built this event into what it is if we’d just used Gartner’s database. On our Web site, we help build the community with news. Anybody can put up on the site what they believe is important to them and the rest of the community. And the hits on our Web site have quadrupled over the past year.

And we’ve delved into spaces that nobody else wanted, like the small business space. They were the forgotten mass of people within the community, and we’ve started this road show of eight cities this year, ten cities next year, and within that partnership, we’ve brought all these people together—D&H, Ingram Micro, NASBA, CompTIA, Channel Match, and many others—to drive the community for the greater good. In IT ChannelVision, we brought the enterprise service providers into the event. So now we cover the channel all the way from small business through the mid-size and up into the enterprise space. Because a small company is going to aspire to be a mid-size company, and a mid-size will aspire to be an enterprise. People get to see all these new products they never would have seen before because smaller vendors don’t have the reach to get into the enterprise space. And now there’s all kinds of business being written because of the event.

RAM: Having just wrapped up the first year of Small Business Vision, what benefits do you think this event brought to the channel?

PM: Tier-one vendors could never find these small reseller people. It’s opened up new avenues for reaching their products and services that they’re now able to bring to the small business space. And it’s almost like a cult following. Because in the small business space, an operation might only be 10 or 15 people, and these are not the people that would go to a show. When they leave the office, they’re not putting any bread on the table. We’re opening these people up to vendor presentations and partnerships that they never would’ve seen before, giving them Gartner insight into the small business space, which is really invaluable for these people. But I think the biggest thing we do with any of our events is we open them up to peer-to-peer interaction. They learn more from each other than they could ever learn from a book or from vendors.

Page