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By William Van Winkle |
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kinG arthur had a problem. At a time when distances seemed great and communication was poor, local nobles held almost total control over their regions. Arthur was the land’s king, which meant he was in constant need of ways not only to keep in touch with what was happening in Britain’s many regions but also to keep those nobles happy. Having a fancy sword pulled out of a boulder wasn’t enough. Arthur needed help and good advice, so he convened a council of these nobles and made them his leading knights. Less successful kings would gather their knights and tell them what to do. Arthur wanted his knights to feel important and honestly valued them for their insight and bravery. So he took the unconventional step of gathering them at a round table. At a usual table, the king sat at the head, privileged position. At a round table, there was no privileged position, hence no bickering and brawling over who should sit where. It was an environment of equal peers all cooperating toward common goals. You would be surprised—or maybe not—at how many times I approach resellers for their thoughts in articles and am dismissed out of hand. Some are honest enough to give me the real explanation: Their approach to digital signage or small form factor or remote management or this or that is the company’s secret sauce. If they shared their recipe with me, I might print it, spread it to the whole channel, and suddenly their competitors would learn how to crush them out of business. I can relate to this type of thinking. As a one-time short fiction writer, I went through a stage of paranoia too. “I have to keep this idea to myself, because it’s so good that I know someone will steal it, write the story for himself, and publish it before I do.” Only time and experience taught me that there are so many good ideas, so many ways to achieve success in whatever you do, that there’s no need to be so secretive. If one idea is all that separates a writer or reseller from success or failure, odds are he won’t be in business much longer. Conversely, I can’t think of a single instance where sharing ideas in a round table fashion, whether around an actual table or in the media, has harmed anyone. National distributor SYNNEX has hosted a national sales conference every summer for many years. Four years ago, company president Bob Huang got the idea to hand pick a few attendees from this group, invite a select group of major vendors, and convene a round table of sorts to open a more honest, constructive discussion than what could be done in a regular channel event setting. The session proved so successful that this advisory council, officially now called the SYNNEX System Builder Advisory Council (SBAC), meets twice each year. Both as a reseller in the past and as a channel trade writer now, I’ve seen a lot of vendor and distributor efforts pitched as philanthropy that in fact turn out to be blatant, selfish attempts to generate more revenue. “Look at this new channel program! It’s going to help everybody!” Sure, it’ll help provided you don’t sell the competitor’s product and increase your purchasing by, oh, 500 percent to qualify for the highest program level. “Come to our show and learn about this hot new technology that can reshape your business!” That’s actually code for: “Come watch our idiot assistant marketing manager read from an incomprehensible PowerPoint presentation for an hour and be bored out of your skull!” Forgive my skepticism; I’ve grown it the hard way. Legend pegs the number of knights that sat around Arthur’s table at anywhere from a dozen to 366; SYNNEX convenes 25 to 35 resellers in addition to two or three reps each from a group of vendor participants, as well as a small number of SYNNEX execs, including CEO/president Bob Huang, president of US distribution Peter Larocque, senior VP Steve Ichinaga, and associate VP, marketing and strategic alliances, Frank Raimondi, among others. SYNNEX encourages vendors to devote only a fraction of their one-hour speaking slot to presentations and focus most of it on Q&A. British lore from the 13th century on down to Monty Python indicates that the hearts of Arthur’s knights were pure. Can the same be said of the vendors at SYNNEX’s council? “I’ll be frank,” says Steve Bohman, vice president of operations at Columbus Micro Systems, one of the SBAC’s resellers. “Some vendors come in and don’t even have a good agenda, and their presentation will unfortunately dissolve into...not a very useful way to spend their or our time. But the vendors that have a better understanding of the opportunity in front of them have come in and used their time to make it less of sales pitch and more of an opportunity to interact, realizing they’ve got some resellers in front of them with useful input on how the vendor can better serve its customers. “It’s not unlike the Gartner IT ChannelVision event,” Bohman adds, “in the sense that it’s up to the vendor to speak with customers. This is opposed to showing a slide deck for 20 minutes, and that’s that. That’s a waste of everybody’s time. So when a vendor does take advantage of the opportunity, they can get valuable feedback from the room, from the reseller community, in terms of what they need to do to better serve us, what they need to do to better compete. It can benefit the channel as a whole, whether it’s SYNNEX’s advisory council, IT ChannelVision—whenever vendors are speaking to system builders and looking for feedback. Any time they can get input to improve their products and programs, it’s going to have an overall positive influence on the channel. That’s why I personally have put time into the effort.” As an example of the positive change such meetings can have, Bohman points to Hitachi Global Storage Techologies, which until recently didn’t have an advanced warranty replacement policy that would allow an enterprise-level drive to get replaced overnight. Now, Hitachi has put that program element in place, primarily, according to Bohman, based on feedback from the SBAC group. Bohman notes that other positive examples from various advisory councils include Intel’s SS4000-E (“Baxter Creek”) NAS device, the Verified By Intel whitebook program, and AMD’s new AMD Validated Solutions (AVS) program. Many major vendors have round table advisory councils in one form or another. NEC Display’s advisory council was central in developing that company’s system builder program, with the result that NEC Display went from being a premium brand sold into a handful of high-end niches to a major player in the system builder community. SYNNEX’s Raimondi notes that the council is designed to be a win-win-win for all parties involved. Certainly, there are reciprocal benefits between the resellers and vendors. Resellers get to air their wish lists and, by addressing them, vendors develop stronger businesses. But on the sidelines, SYNNEX also comes out ahead. Not only does the company end up with stronger personal ties to all parties involved—and presumably purchases from reseller participants—but the distributor’s executives get a better sense of how to work with vendors to improve their own programs. If this is selfish, then participants sure didn’t perceive it as such. “After about the first three sessions, I told my boss that I really was expecting a dog and pony show. And I did not get that sense,” says Gayle Mitchell, materials manager at Panasas, Inc., a storage solutions reseller and SBAC member. “I felt like everyone was listening to me. Intel even told me that I’d won the Stump the Chump award because I asked them a question they were totally unprepared to answer. So they now know that when they get in front of someone with my sort of background, they need to be ready to address this stuff. Seagate said they would have been satisfied if they’d walked away from the event with one good action item, and after the first half of the day, they already felt like they had three or four. “One voice is really easy to ignore,” adds Mitchell. “But when vendors are hearing all of us together hollering out the same thing, I think that has more weight for them. One-on-one with just me and the vendor isn’t necessarily the value. It’s having peers where we can second each other’s opinions—and having the distributor sitting right there listening so he can know that this is why I haven’t picked this vendor in the past.” If you’ve stayed through my metaphorical meanderings thus far, then allow me one last leap: You don’t have to own a seat at the round table to be a knight of the channel. Many resellers don’t have the volume needed to earn their way into advisory councils. But even if you’re a little reseller with some great ideas, there are places to be heard. You could attend the Intel Channel Conference (ICC). All you need to get invited is membership in the vendor’s channel program. Yeah, such shows draw their share of groggy squires, windmill chasers, and other quacks. But at least Intel is giving them a chance to be heard. Everyone gets a voice, and part of the conference’s mission is to make sure that good ideas get passed upstream. Outside sales reps, and, to a lesser degree, inside sales reps also make it part of their job to pass worthy comments higher up. If nothing else, send messages through vendors’ reseller portal pages. There are many ways to shout your ideas into the void, and if enough people shout the same idea, it will get listened to. This is just as true within advisory councils, as Mitchell says, as it is outside of them. There is one caveat, though. You need to buy through authorized distributors, and you need to be an active part of your vendors’ channel programs. Otherwise, you’re invisible to those manufacturers. They can’t recognize your sales and, so far as they can tell, you have no interest in being a partner. Cozying up with the gray market means you value price above all else. You don’t expect much from manufacturers with that mindset, right? As Bohman notes, “the vendors that are the most receptive to input are the ones that are bringing more to the table than just price or a cheap product.” No doubt, vendors have the same sentiment about resellers. Over time, the idea of the Arthurian Round Table became closely tied to the Holy Grail, which, as anybody who’s followed the Indiana Jones movies knows, symbolizes the quest for enlightenment. With resellers, vendors, and distributors working together for greater understanding, what dragon can’t be slain? What problems can’t be overcome? Illumination is not something you find by locking your ideas away in a cave; it’s something you find through sharing and building together. |
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