Profitable Partners Are Loyal Partners

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It’s the end of the quarter, and we need to make the number. So out come the promos! We’ve all heard them before. “Buy 4, get 1 Free”. “Take 2 months stock, and I’ll give you a discount”. “Drop your margin by a couple of points to help us get this deal, and we’ll owe … Continued

Is There A Need For The Channel In The Cloud?

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There is no doubt that customers are starting to examine how they procure technology, and opting for a Cloud model rather than the traditional CapEx model. However, while this shift may provide a range of benefits for the customer and potentially the channel, it also brings with it some fundamental changes to the way technology … Continued

Enable Your Partners Till They’re Unconscious

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In a previous article, I wrote about the parallels between recruiting people and recruiting partners, and how the principles we apply to recruiting staff are equally applicable to recruiting partners. Today, we look at the parallels between developing staff and enabling partners. Over the years, the “Conscious Competence” Model has become a popular and insightful … Continued

Innovate, Partner or Perish

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I’m not normally an early adopter, but I was one of the first people to buy a Windows mobile phone. And I loved it. It let me receive email, synced with my diary and contained all my contact details. Then Apple released the iPhone. And it took me a few years (like I said, I’m … Continued

Treat Your Vendors Like Customers

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Look up the definition of “customer” in pretty much any dictionary and you’ll get a definition that goes something like “a person or organisation that buys goods or services from you”. But smart resellers understand that their customers include another definition, namely, “a person or organisation that SELLS goods or services TO you”. I’m talking … Continued

Sell through Partners, not to them

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It is a constant source of surprise to me how often Channel Managers (and I’m talking about intelligent, professional, and experienced individuals) inflict product presentations on their partners that they would never want to sit through themselves. Ask someone what they hate about PowerPoint, and you nearly always get the same answers (too many slides, … Continued

Channel Management – A New Era

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What a difference a year makes! As channel consultants, we get a feel for the health of the industry by the type of projects we are asked to work on. And over the last twelve months we’ve seen a real shift from tactical, short-term return projects, to strategic, longer-term projects designed around building strong sustainable … Continued

What Else Is On The Menu

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You probably never thought that eating a salad could help you grow your business! In this article that appeared in CRN, Moheb Moses talks about the dangers of assuming how much your customers actually know about your business, and gives some valuable advice on how you can build stronger relationships with customers. http://www.crn.com.au/News/168877,opinion-what-else-is-on-the-menu.aspx

Play To Your Strength

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I know it sounds absurd in today’s environment, but I used to work for a distributor selling a word processor, and we used to make 30% margin (before you start thinking I was being greedy, I’ll say that our resellers also made that kind of margin). The year was 1988 and the product was WordPerfect. … Continued