ScanSource: New Financial Services App ‘Takes The Lift Off Partners’

‘Solution providers need to discover new opportunities. But they often need to rely on partners to finance the process, and to get working capital ready. We are encourage partners to talk to financial services reps regarding everything from invoicing to billing via third-party providers,’ says Ansley Hoke, ScanSource’s senior vice president of global marketing.

ScanSource Wednesday opened its Virtual Partner Conference 2021 with a number of enhancements to its channel partner programs including new ways to bring its channel base the latest in industry trends and to help them finance their customer activities.

Virtual Partner Conference 2021 is unique for ScanSource in that it is the first time the company is bringing together partners from its traditional hardware business, its Intelisys master agent business and it POS Portal mobile payments business, said Ray Nelson, the distributor’s senior vice president of technical sales and services.

[Related: ScanSource CEO Mike Baur On Distributor Consolidation, Intelisys]

“We’re not just a hardware distributor,” Nelson told CRN. “We’re a hybrid distributor. We’ve made it so partners can conduct business how they want to.”

Ansley Hoke, senior vice president of global marketing for the Greenville, S.C.-based distributor, told CRN that the distributor has separate ScanSource, Intelisys and POS Portal conferences and that Wednesday’s conference is centered around the traditional ScanSource business.

“This is the first time we’ve invited all three types of partners to one conference,” she said. “We have been educating VARs to become Intelisys agents and vice versa. We want to expand their business.”

In terms of new programs for partners, ScanSource Wednesday formally launched a new app, Find Your Focus, which is aimed at helping partners with invoicing and collection so they can focus on finding the next new deal while the distributor handles the financial side, Hoke said

“Solution providers need to discover new opportunities,” she said. “But they often need to rely on partners to finance the process, and to get working capital ready. We encourage partners to talk to financial services reps regarding everything from invoicing to billing via third-party providers. This takes the lift off partners.”

Casey Huffling, senior vice president of ScanSource’s North America specialty sales, told CRN that the distributor has a new financial development team that looks at how to work with end users on partners’ behalf and to expand partners’ purchasing power.

“The team was developed over the last couple months,” Huffling said. “It is helping partners drive the sale, work the sale and drive business after the sale.”

Also new is an umbrella program, ScanSource Services+, which is aimed at helping partners with services and resources from pre-sale to post-sale to more easily provide services to customers, Nelson said.

“ScanSource Services+ is all about helping partners get into new areas, starting with planning and design,” he said. “For example, a partner looking at mobility might need scanners for curbside delivery as well as wireless connectivity for the scanners. But they will also need services to assess customer needs.”

Other customers may be looking to move to the cloud, Nelson said. “We can help them migrate to [Microsoft] Azure,” he said.

ScanSource is also refreshing its ScanSource University with a focus on the distributor’s core platforms, Hoke said. This includes enhanced education components around launching new products and helping find new opportunities, as well as a new executive podcast to help partners capitalize on the latest trends starting with mobility, she said.

ScanSource has a history of helping channel partners evolve, said Joe Scotti, vice president of sales at Edge Communications, a Plano, Texas-based solution provider and MSP and longtime ScanSource partner with a focus on voice, Wi-Fi and carrier services.

Scotti told CRN to look to his own company as an example.

“ScanSource helped us with traditional voice and on-premises PBX, and helped us move to cloud-based technologies,” he said. “The people at ScanSource are top-notch.”

Scotti said his firm is interested in getting more cloud-focused training from ScanSource.

“ScanSource is showing us how edge services can add an additional 12 to 15 points of margin,” he said. “For the cloud itself, we typically get 20 points of margin. But if we wrap other services around it, it can drive margins up.”

The distributor also has great subject matter experts when it comes to areas such as VoIP and Wi-Fi, he said, and will use a combination of Edge Communications’ vendor-provided market development funds and ScanSource-provided funds to help with marketing to develop new opportunities, he said.

“Even in a difficult 2020, ScanSource was proactive in coming to us while business was slower to provide a lot of training, mostly around cloud and cloud-based voice,” he said. “They helped us understand the process. The presenters really knew their stuff.”