Being Direct With VARs
Vendors that have benefited from partners incurring the high cost of new-customer acquisition should not be making any such direct entreaty unless it is a renewal or upgrade opportunity. In such cases, the partner's name and phone number should be listed front and center as the primary contact. What's happening is that vendors frustrated with software licensing and maintenance renewal rates are making a direct grab without even informing the partners that made the deal in the first place.
Certainly, even a direct sales bigot would concede that it is bad business and sneaky at best to try to take such a deal and move it to a direct relationship without a partner's input. Any such play is confusing to customers, who look to solution providers as their trusted advisers/outsourced IT departments. Those that doubt this is the case are living in the channel dark ages. It violates all tenets of rudimentary SMB economics for vendors to think they can cost- effectively go direct to the SMB market.
Vendors must adopt clear, printed channel policies that give the solution providers that made an initial license/maintenance sale a set deadline to obtain the renewal. Whether that is 30 or 60 days before the contract is up should be decided between the vendor and its partner. These policies then should be updated annually. In addition, vendors must adopt a no-nonsense set of rules guaranteeing solution providers that customer names will not be shared with other vendors, affiliated companies or even solution provider competitors. That's just a good, standard privacy policy.
Of course, more than a few vendors would prefer to operate in the shadows with no printed policy on when and under what conditions they will contact an SMB customer. All the better to pull the rug out from under their "trusted partner" so they can take the deal direct.
What vendors are not being direct with you? Contact Steven Burke at (781) 839-1221 or via e-mail at [email protected].