Avnet Gets SMART With Lead-Generation Program

Avnet Hall-Mark, however, may have a secret formula on its hands with its SMART marketing program. The enterprise distributor recently announced that its lead-management system helped its reseller customers close $165 million in business over a 15-month period. It's no coincidence, either, that parent company Avnet announced a stellar third-quarter performance this spring with a 17 percent jump in revenue and an eye-popping 1,700 percent improvement in earnings.

Steve Tepedino, president of Avnet Hall-Mark, says the distributor's SMART marketing program is designed to give individual resellers better visibility as to what type of leads work best for them and what kinds of marketing efforts can help close a deal with a particular end user. The program includes a SMARTracker lead-management tool, which is a closed-loop, data-rich system that allows authorized Avnet resellers to view prequalified leads online 24/7 through the distributor's Channel Connection Partner Portal. It also provides information to help solution providers evaluate, track and update the leads and resulting business.

"You're able to track what you sold to whom and quantify what the economic benefit of the sale is," Tepedino says. "So resellers can decide if they want to replicate that kind of sale because they have a better idea of what the return was."

Therefore, Tepedino says, marketing is now a "much tighter business" for Avnet and its reseller customers because the distributor can better measure the efficiency of an investment in a particular go-to-market effort. In addition, Avnet itself can examine what vertical markets and technologies offer the best returns for its customers.

For example, in March Avnet launched a new program, dubbed Market Connection, to offer enhanced training, education and go-to-market services for its Hewlett-Packard solution providers. The distributor recently launched a regulatory compliance training and education track for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act through Market Connection; the track is aimed at preparing resellers to rapidly enter the specialized compliance market by helping them identify opportunities and effectively deliver solutions.

Tepedino also says vendors' growing interest in the midmarket has created additional opportunities for resellers in terms of joint programs with top vendors.

"All of our vendors want to get more out of the elusive midmarket," he says, "and these programs can help do that."

For its part, Avnet still sees the responsibility of demand generation being in the vendors' corners. The distributor sees itself as an aggregator or director of demand to the reseller channel. Still, in some situations, Avnet has achieved success in helping solution providers market to their end users. For example, Chouinard and Myhre (C&M), an IBM Business Partner in Cotati, Calif., with only 26 employees, doesn't have the resources to wage major marketing campaigns on its own, so it turns to Avnet.

"Avnet has a marketing department that I think is just outstanding," says Mike Zeppegno, C&M's vice president of marketing. "I come up with the idea and the target marketplace, and then they look at their portfolio and see successful campaigns in other parts of the country."

Avnet lends its marketing expertise as well as its resources to C&M, allowing the solution provider to reach more end-user customers. "I run three to five marketing campaigns per quarter, but without Avnet's help, I doubt we could do more than one per quarter," Zeppegno says.

Whoever it is, someone is generating a lot of demand for C&M's solutions. The company earned an award from IBM as one of the fastest-growing companies in the second half of 2003, with a growth rate of 157 percent.

"There's no way we would [have attained] that kind of growth without the help of Avnet," Zeppegno says.

Tepedino says Avnet Hall-Mark will continue to invest in reseller marketing activities through the SMART program to help its solution providers and vendor partners get a larger piece of the increasing IT spending pie.

"We've seen our partners' and resellers' pipelines increase in business, and there's an increase in IT spending for our targeted end users," Tepedino says. "We're growing at a faster rate, and so are our suppliers."

Peter Jordan (peterjordan@mindspring.com), a freelance writer based in Franklin, Tenn., contributed to this article.