Sony Embraces the Channel
Solution providers have turned heads at Sony Electronics, a vendor long known for its direct sales to consumers. Now VARs can add the Vaio to their linecards.
"A couple of years ago, we made a decision to sell directly to business; we already had a direct business selling to consumers, so it made sense to include business end users," says Mike Abary, vice president of Vaio product marketing at Sony Electronics.
"We had a call center dedicated to selling to the end-user business, but what we learned was that selling to business end users is a completely different proposition than selling to consumer end users," Abary adds. "It's far more complex and requires more interactivity than we had first suspected. We concluded that we couldn't replace the effectiveness of the channel to cater to the [business market]."
Once Sony made the decision to take Vaio indirect, the vendor spent several months retraining its call-center staff, in Austin, Texas, to focus on supporting solution providers instead of end users.
By the beginning of April--the start of its fiscal year 2006--Sony had made significant headway toward a full-fledged channel model, Abary says. For the first half of the year, unit shipments increased 23 percent from the same period a year ago, and sales climbed 26 percent. It's true that the laptop market grew overall in the past year, but Sony gives the channel credit for the dramatic uptick in its portables business.
Executives of the Tokyo-based vendor say Sony has also developed partner incentives for revenue, loyalty and cross-selling across multiple Sony product lines, such as projectors and notebooks.
In addition, the vendor is working to unify its programs for different business units to make it easier for partners that sell across product lines, which has been a pain point for partners in the past.