IBM Offers Broader Sales Incentives For Middleware Sales

The Software Value Incentive (SVI) program is designed to reward partners for all three stages of the sales cycle: opportunity identification; selling or negotiating the sale of middleware products; and fulfillment, or delivery of products to users. Partners can receive up to 40 percent of the price of the software sold, company officials says.

SVI takes a tiered approach, thereby increasing the percentage back to partners through each stage of their involvement in the sale. Also, the program adds additional incentives if the business partner is working with an SMB customer.

As one example, if a partner identifies a new sales opportunity in an SMB account and then is able to sell a solution driven by $15,000 worth of IBM middleware to that user, the partner can receive up to $5,250 cash from the software part of the deal. Under existing programs, partners would normally get $2,250 cash back, IBM says.

“With SVI, we are trying to extend incentives to the widest range of business partners, including consultants, systems integrators, independent software vendors and value-added resellers,” says Neil Isford, vice president of worldwide business partner sales for the IBM Software Group.

IBM sees the added financial rewards as not only compensation for partners for their contribution to the sales process, but also as an investment in partners who will have added incentive to further educate users about other solutions based on open standards.

Some partners like the program because it could serve to eliminate the need to be part of several other IBM partner programs now in place, thereby simplifying the administrative aspect of their lives.

“There have been so many programs partners can join at IBM. But the beauty of this one is instead of managing through three sets of programmatic expectations and metrics, partners have just one to deal with,” says Traci Blowers, manager of business development for The Binary Tree. “This is good for partners who have fewer administrative people to help with this.”

Still, Blowers and some others say they believe the overhead of SVI alone may be too much for some to manage and would not be surprised to see some IBM partners bypass the opportunity.

“The challenge is going to be the administrative side of this process,” Blowers says. “This might shake out the partner community a bit, which is not a bad thing, but I think some smaller partners will walk away from this because it is more work than they are willing to put in.”

Other partners say the program gives them more assurances that they will get returns on their investments made in selling IBM software.

“The concept of rewarding my company for investing in a go-to-market strategy lets me invest in the sales effort with more confidence, which encourages me to focus that investment on IBM,” says Troy Webb, chief marketing officer at InCentric Solutions, a Morrisville, N.C.-based solution provider.

IBM is setting up a portal dedicated to partners registering their sales opportunities. However, partners’ progress in and ownership of a given opportunity is shielded through a new deal-registration technology that helps ensure they will be rewarded for whatever work they have done on a deal.