New TechSelect Tools

Among planned activities by Tech Data for its partner group are additional training for technical sales consultants; an effort to connect TechSelect members with 15 to 20 ISVs that can extend their existing solution offerings; and an end-user awareness campaign in fiscal year 2005, said Stacy Nethercoat, vice president of inside sales and services at Tech Data.

Also planned is an initiative to help the approximately 350 TechSelect members share disciplines or methodologies for running their businesses. During a meeting of the TechSelect membership last week in Chicago, Nethercoat cited one example of this: a methodology for managing professional services that has been developed by ConnectWise, a TechSelect solution provider in Tampa, Fla.

"We're getting to some of the more meaty areas," Nethercoat said.

Overall, Tech Data executives pledged to turn their attention from internal efficiencies to helping solution providers build visibility with sales prospects.

Ken Lamneck, president of the Americas for Tech Data, Clearwater, Fla., said that in August and early September the distributor will train its inside sales team on a new methodology intended to help formalize its overall sales management discipline"turning Tech Data into a more proactive engine for helping solution providers create end-user demand.

"The first process is very fundamental, and that's the territory assessments piece of it," he said. "So we've done a lot of work [to] really understand the size of the market by geography, and we're detailing it out by account so that we can really understand [if] we have all the appropriate resources in the appropriate areas."

In other TechSelect news last week, the distributor pledged to open up its DataPaq Select service to solution providers, broadening their e-commerce presence.

"We all know the expense involved in that, which is prohibitive to most people," said Glen Jodoin, vice president of operations at GreenPages, a Kittery, Maine-based TechSelect member. GreenPages already has tightly coupled its own systems with Tech Data's and has "exceptional" operational functionality underlying its relationship, Jodoin said, although the new service may help him reduce those costs.