Westcon Sees Gains Providing VARs With Operations Help

Westcon Group has found success in the past year with what the distributor calls "out of the box partnering." The distributor offers consulting and help to its VARs in the form of human resources support, marketing assistance, finance and sales training, strategy sessions, networking opportunities and other business operations.

The bet, Westcon executives suggested, is that greater interaction among VAR partners -- both with Westcon and with each other -- will bolster business as a whole.

"Over the last two to three years, especially, we've been reaching out to resellers and asking, 'How do we help you be more effective?'" said Duncan Potter, Westcon Group's Chief Marketing Officer, in an interview. "The answer was, 'Help me with my business. You're a big organization; you have resources that I don't and access to things that I don't.' So we started it in the sales and marketing side and it's worked its way through everything else."

In sales and marketing, Potter said, it's usually a question of asking Westcon VARs what they need and finding out what they're really after from the way they answer.

"They ask, 'Well, how do I create an effective value proposition?' and three or four questions in, what we tend to find is that starts around demand gen and, 'I want leads,'" Poter said. "And we say, 'If you're going to have higher ROI, you've got to address other pieces in general. How effective is your sales force? Do you have a specific approach? Have you achieved that?' Once you're having that discussion, then it becomes a general partnership, rather than, 'I, the distributor, am going to use some vendor money to get you some leads.' You've got to dig deeper."

"We're trying to find unique ways to partner and always find ways to articulate our value proposition. Over the last number of years, it's been shifting away from traditional operations and fulfillment and reaching farther and deeper into organizations," added Lynn Smurthwaite-Murphy, vice president of Westcon Canada. "Our resellers, a lot of them don't have formal HR departments, for example. That type of consultative engagement is also something that more and more partners are leveraging."

According to Westcon, the most common requests from VARs center around recruiting and retaining talent, streamlining their internal operations and honing their sales pitches.

Tim Cook, vice president of sales for Dramis, a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based solution provider, said Westcon's subject matter experts had tailored sales training and HR support and helped his organization with reviewing its business strategy.

"These things set them apart from all other distributors," he said, "while creating stronger loyalty between both companies."

Lucy Graham, senior marketing manager at Carousel Industries, Exeter, R.I., said she had used Westcon experts to develop customer testimonial videos.

"They are all extremely professional and, with their range of experience, offer a wide range of marketing advice to my team," Graham said.

According to Potter, Westcon plans to expand its offerings to include more strategy sessions for VAR partners devoted to specific verticals like health care and education, and issues such as managed services and building an international business. In the past year, sessions have also covered how to drive more engagement and profit from existing customers and how to raise money during the credit crunch.

Potter and Smurthwaite-Murphy both pointed out how community building is a by-product of Westcon's more intensive engagement, and that VARs have reacted most favorably to being able to network on a closer level.

"They're not going to share their lists, but they will talk to each other. They want to hear from each other. They want to hear best practices," Potter said. "A kind of traditional approach is to run a really big meeting with experts and someone who comes in with 50 slides, and they'll walk away saying 'great,' and the next day don't change their behavior and haven't learned very much."

"What we're hearing from [VARs] is, 'I don't want to hear from a vendor or distributor, I want to hear from my peers,'" he added. "That's something infinitely more powerful than the approach of, 'I'm going to stand here and tell you how to do better.' The community is the steering point. It's very basic stuff, but it actually does work."

Tweet

   

More Channel Programs