Ingram Partners Prefer Value-Added Services
About half of the 700 solution providers in Ingram Micro's first rollout of the program chose Active Choice, which offers middle-tier pricing and access to some value-added services such as tech support. About 40 percent chose Professional Choice, which offers the highest pricing and access to the most services. And about 10 percent chose Independent Choice, which offers rock-bottom pricing but few services.
"We thought the mix between Professional and Active would be about 90 percent. It's a little more Professional than we thought, but not outside the range of prediction," said Pat Collins, senior group vice president of sales and marketing.
More people are choosing Professional because of the access to technical support and same-day shipping services, Collins said.
Even with the highest level of pricing of Professional Choice, Shoemaker Motion Picture Co. has remained competitive in bids because of benefits such as free shipping, said Mark Farmer, bid coordinator at Shoemaker, an Indianapolis-based audio/video solution provider.
"The key things with this program where we're benefiting are we're getting discounts with shipping, or no shipping [charges]," Farmer said. "That's helped our profit margin go up. We see significant savings, and we're able to beat out competition. When they say, 'what price do you have?' we're able to match those prices. The shipping is what kills us. That's what was driving our pricing up."
Ingram Micro also promised to tweak the program as needed. To date, the distributor changed one of the fulfillment upgrade packages to include same-day shipping, which was a big request from solution providers, Collins said.
"We were not married to anything in this process other than its success," Collins said. "As we go through this and get feedback, we will make modifications."
He said channel feedback also showed that tech support and service-level agreements were critical.
Ingram Micro plans to roll out Choice Advantage to all of its 20,000 VAR customers by the end of the year, Collins said. The next wave of users will likely come in the third quarter.