Valentine Puts Channel Plans In High Gear

Mike Valentine, former vice president of channel sales at SonicWall, in May was named vice president of America Sales, responsible for U.S. channel strategy. Valentine recently spoke with Editor Heather Clancy. Excerpts follow.

CRN: What's your strategy regarding direct-marketing resellers? How do you differentiate vs. what you do with the core VAR channel?

VALENTINE: I think if we had to encapsulate what we really want to do with the channel, it's really inclusive, meaning that I think that the way we're looking at the channel is a little revolutionary. We have the larger DMRs and then what we classify as VAMs, the value-added merchants. They do service, they do a great attach rate, but it is a value-added merchant. Where we would consider Ingram [Micro] and Tech Data a broadline distributor and Alternative Technology a VAD, we would consider some of the larger DMRs to be broadliners and these companies to be more value-added.

CRN: Can you give me a few examples?

VALENTINE: Virtual Graffiti [of Irvine, Calif.], and CPU Sales and Services here on the East Coast [in Waltham, Mass.]. Traditionally, other manufacturers in the past, I think, have tried to take their VAR program and shoehorn these guys in. They don't do business like a VAR.

CRN: How do you treat them differently?

VALENTINE: It's license structure—what they get on the back end, what formulates their rebates, what formulates their back-end dollars. What drives their business is what we're going to wrap our program around.

CRN: What's your main intention?

VALENTINE: We're really going for two things. We want to be inclusive. We don't want to have a one-size-fits-all program. We want them to take a look at the menu and say, 'You know, this fits me.' The second thing is we are going to be aggressive. We have utilized some of the sales techniques from Lasso Logic [which SonicWall acquired in 2005]. They had such a hard-nosed approach to sales, and they were fantastic at outbounding and recruiting.

It's a team of about six people, and what they do is they actually recruit VARs. They go out and they hit the phone. So we want to be aggressive in our recruiting structure. And then when we recruit these people, now we're back to having them look at what fits them the best.