Lead Time: Making The Customer Connection

As more partners recognize the growing trend and importance of marketing, they are looking to develop their own brand and market themselves as a full-ranging solution provider. Prior to the recent news making waves across the industry, including Hewlett-Packard's planned split into two companies, Symantec's decision to separate into security and storage businesses, and other potential moves analyzed by CRN, channel chiefs from Cisco Systems, Dell, HP and IBM sat down with CRN editors at XChange to talk about the shifting tides of the cloud era and what they mean to a solution provider's business.

Tami Duncan, vice president, North America channels, at IBM, noted that even companies that may have previously have called themselves VARs, or value-added resellers, now bristle at the term. "They don't want to be called that," she said. "They're shifting. They are solution providers, or distributors who are moving to solution distribution. They are very much stepping in to fill that gap."

Channel chiefs say solution providers are coming to them with specific requests to improve their marketing strategy. Duncan said IBM even set up a weekly discussion called "Think Friday" with partners, which has served as a forum for businesses to brainstorm.

Frank Vitagliano, vice president, channel sales, at Dell, said he believes now, more than ever, solution providers are thinking about marketing to bolster revenue.

"I've actually seen them become a lot more thoughtful with us [regarding] how to go to market," he said. "For years, it was just all about referral business."

Vitagliano said partners used to rely heavily on vendor programs for their marketing and now they appear to be taking on the majority of the workload themselves.

"Partner marketing really didn't exist probably 10 years ago," he said. "The reason a lot of it exists in a lot of cases is because we helped drive a lot of it from the vendor standpoint by making it easy for them. ... They are doing more of that, and I think there's absolutely more thought being put into it."

"It's really driving that solution base," Duncan added, "and we're seeing the partners get much more sophisticated in how they're representing themselves on the Web, what they're calling themselves, the kinds of things they're leading with. They may still drive a lot of point product, but that’' not how they're leading their positioning as they're going out to their clients, which I think is fantastic."

Lori Koch, director of field marketing at solution provider NWN, Waltham, Mass., said concentrating on marketing has helped NWN in recent months. She said NWN also connects with customers through social media.

"It's working for us. We have a lot of our loyal customers on our Facebook page and are able to communicate with them via that channel," she said. "We're also using advertising through LinkedIn. ... We also completely rebranded our website to include search engine optimization and we'll eventually do search engine marketing to go along with it. Our website will be one of our biggest channels to grab attention and drive people to it. ... We dove into it really a year and a half ago and we're starting to see the return on it now."

Koch noted NWN writes a blog and takes advantage of some vendor offerings in marketing. She pointed to organizations like VMware, which continues to help providers.

"I'd love to see [vendors] provide more fully funded programs online because it is hard to have a traditional marketing strategy combined with a digital marketing strategy for our budget," she said.

Bruce Klein, senior vice president of Worldwide Partner Organization, Cisco, described for CRN the relationship between Cisco and the channel as a "true partnership" when it comes to assisting in developing strategies for marketing.

"We want to make sure that they've got the skills and capabilities and they've got the talent and they leverage as much as they can that we can provide them," Klein said. "That's what we’re working on -- all the tools and enablement, so that we can train them, but also help them leverage our materials and they can customize it around their branding and their differentiation and put it out."

Stephen DiFranco, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard's Solution Partners Organization, said though, he believes solution providers have relied on manufacturers in the past to set up call centers and to do outbound marketing for them.

But that will have to change, he said.

"They're going to have to build marketing departments and [partners] don't really know how to do that yet. So this is going to be an interesting evolution for them because the manufacturers can't help them with that because they do need to build their own brand," he said. "They're going to need to build their own service offering. It's going to have to be less, 'I represent HP’s line,' and turns into, 'This is the service package I have to offer.' That's different."

Will Knight, vice president of channel partner sales, at Rackspace, said VARs are getting more sophisticated in their marketing, but noted branding issues can arise when they get into difficult subjects such as cloud offerings and hybrid environments.

"The complexity makes the sales methodology tough to perfectly define and the complexity and diverse set of people that are in it requires a greater sophistication in the types of solutions," Knight said.

James Van Loan, sales manager for Golden West Technologies, Rapid City, S.D., said marketing has been a significant initiative at the company and that it's still hard to help customers understand what a VAR can offer.

"[It is difficult to explain], just because we offer so many services to so many different organizations so that's why we have to provide more of a targeted approach," Van Loan said. "Instead of having to explain all the various technologies we do, it's more about the type of partnership we provide so that we can focus on the success of our customers' business."

PUBLISHED OCT. 13, 2014