The four questions most channel vendors won’t want to answer.
In this challenging economy, we hear every day that it is harder than ever to be a channel partner. Most channel programs are complex, inflexible, hard to manage and difficult to track, pricing and deal conflicts are frequent, margins are shrinking and operating expenses are increasing. So you have to ask, what has your channel vendor done to help you deliver a lot more to your customers and still make more profit, in spite of a challenging economy? Here are four difficult questions that most vendors won’t answer:
How do I know you aren’t competing with me?
To answer this question, you need to look at a channel vendor’s actions, rather than what they say. Is your channel vendor buying services companies and giving a select few sweetheart deals giving, like 500,000 sales leads and funding 100 sales people, which compete against you? Do you have to use their services, or only use your own services, or do you have a choice of delivering the services you want and selling through the ones you don’t at a profit? Can you register deals so they are yours alone, protected from your vendor’s direct sales efforts and other channel partners?
What are you doing to make your program easier to administer, so I can use less resources?
One channel vendor just “simplified” their channel program and promotions from 140 down to only 40 (even 40 sounds like a lot). Still, many channel partners tell us that they have to hire and maintain dedicated staff just to work with a channel vendor, since the programs and compensation schemes are so complex. They tell us of multiple points of contact, complex administration rules, and having to work across multiple lines of business. Shouldn’t there be fewer moving parts in a program designed to avoid channel conflict, so the costs of administering a program are lowered? Shouldn’t there be a dedicated channel organization at the vendor, a single point of contact and online administration, so you can focus more on your customers and less on managing the details of a program? (There is a great blog post from Doug Ford, from The I.T. Pros, and a quote from John A. Sheaffer, CEO, Sysix solutions, Inc.: “Compared to other channel programs Dell PartnerDirect is a fresh, innovative, and doesn’t have a 30-year lineage of bureaucracy.”)
What are you doing to make your technology easier to get, deploy, and manage?
Face, it, IT is really complex, both for you and your customers. So how many companies are simplifying IT to ensure that each piece of technology you deliver is designed to reduce the costs of deployment, support and management? (Hint: There is only one.) Simplifying IT can help you lower your internal costs of delivering technology to your customers, so you can pass some savings on and still be more profitable. Shouldn’t your servers, clients, and storage be greener, use less power, and offer demonstrably better price/performance advantage than what is out there? Can you get a fully-functioning SAN straight from the box in under an hour?
What can you do to reduce my costs of customizing and shipping?
Many channel vendors ask you to order a ‘plain vanilla’ product from the warehouse so you can customize, and sometimes assemble, on site. Shouldn’t you be able to order systems right from the factory pre-customized, with images, software & components already loaded? And why take the extra step to ship to your site? Why not “factorize” deployments to save money by aggregating shipments, pre-installing standard & custom software loads, shrink wrapping, labeling, asset tagging, stickering, applying custom skins, laser etching, including custom pack slips, and even allowing for custom boxes (so the shipment comes from you, not the vendor)?
Only Dell PartnerDirect offers a dramatically different kind of channel program because it was built from the start to significantly reduce costs and increase channel partner sales and profitability. With Dell PartnerDirect, we work hard to avoid conflict, not create it. No program is perfect, but Dell certainly is working harder to take a different approach. If you disagree, let me know.