Five questions to ask when choosing a vendor to work with

With so many technology vendors in today’s market place and everyone competing for your business, you, the channel partner, need to decide which vendor or vendors you want to build a relationship and go to market with.

According to a Forrester Research report published in April of this year, titled The Five Things Channel Partners Want from Tech Vendors by Tim Harmon, Peter O’Neill and Zachary Reiss-Davis, channel partners typically base their potential vendor assessments on five criteria.

The report states that “new vendor-channel partner relationships are going to be forged on how well vendors can deliver on channel partners’ expectations.”

When partners are figuring out which vendor or vendors they’d like to work with, Forrester said they often want to have these five questions answered: “How big is the market opportunity for this vendor’s product’s, what are my paths to profit with this vendor, how will this vendor help/support me, how is this vendor’s channel program superior (and) how will this vendor showcase my value to customers?”

Michelle Warren, founder and president of Toronto-based MW Research & Consulting, said partners decide who they want to work with based on a couple of factors.

“The most important is which (vendor) offers the ‘best’ solution for their client both in terms of cost and effectiveness,” she said. “Another key factor is which vendor is easier to work with through technical support, warranty services, sales support and of course, product quality.”

On average, Warren said smaller resellers tend to have a minimum of two vendors they work with in particular areas so they can not only provide their customers with choice, but so they can offer competitive prices. On the other hand, larger resellers usually have at least three vendor partners depending on their size and the diversity of their end-user base, she added.

CDN reached out to three security vendors to find out what they’re doing in each of the five criteria, as stated in the Forrester report. While the Kaspersky Lab, McAfee and Symantec brands are fairly recognizable amongst consumers and enterprises, each has a different sized partner community helping it go to market.

From a global perspective, Kaspersky Lab has about 3,000 channel partners, while McAfee has about 19,000 and Symantec has a network of more than 40,000 partners.

Below are the five questions from the report and a glimpse at what each vendor is doing to help differentiate themselves and to attract more partners.

1) How big is the market opportunity for (your) products?

Alex Thurber, senior vice-president of worldwide channel operations at McAfee, said the company sees the area around global security being an $80 billion market opportunity.

“Security is such a hot technology because every year it seems to be the better year for partners to be in the security business,” he said.

Over at Kaspersky, Kristen Capone, vice-president of North American channel sales, said the company recently began expanding via new routes to market by focusing on “larger deal sized opportunities” in the enterprise.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in this segment and with our enterprise bookings quarter over quarter, which is appealing to partners,” Capone said.

2) What are some ways to make a profit with (you)?

Tricia Atchison, senior director for North America channel marketing at Symantec, said the company has several enablement programs and resources to help partners make money. Some of these include partner-led consulting services, Symantec’s ExSP Licensing Program, new specializations, an Extended Terms Finance Program, and more.

“We’ve heard from our partners that they want more opportunities to deliver services to their customers and we’re evolving our consulting services to be primarily driven by our partners,” she explained. “Given our strength of our channel partners when it comes to delivering professional services, we see this partner-led consulting model as a natural fit.”

3) What sort of help and support do (you) offer?

At Kaspersky, Capone said the company helps its partners through initiatives such as deal registration and promotions around that.

“We try to protect partners with deal registration and we have a promotion with that this year where partners can make more money in this highly competitive environment through double deal registration,” Capone said.

4) How is (your) channel program superior and different from others?

“We’re focused on listening to our partners and doing what we can to make it easier to do business with (us), and to enable our partners to find more new business opportunities,” Atchison said. “As we’ve evolved our Symantec Partner Program, we’ve relied on the feedback and guidance of our partners to help us. Several of our program enhancements and updates were born directly from partner feedback … (and) we’ll continually work on our program to ensure we meet (partners’) needs.”

5) How will (you) showcase (your) partners’ values to the global market and customer space?

At McAfee, Thurber said the company hosts Focus, its partner and customer conference, annually in October each year. This year, the company added an extra partner day to the event in order to allow for more training.

“Customers come to Focus to learn about our technology and about the value of working with our products and our partners are there to help joint sell,” Thurber explained. “This helps enforce the partner as the trusted advisor.”

Over at Kaspersky, Capone said the company promotes its partners through field marketing and demand generation efforts.”

“You’ll see press releases on the wire on new partners in different regions (of the world) where it makes sense on a strategic level,” she said. “We also have news and information about our partners on our Kaspersky partner portal, which is the partner-facing segment of Kaspersky.com. We’ll also do things like case studies and spotlighting for our partners.”

In addition to being able to offer channel partners something in each of these five areas, Forrester’s report also recommends that vendors who also offer business model training will find themselves “ahead of the pack” when it comes to partner recruitment.

“Vendors that grasp the opportunity to take the lead in business model training will not only find themselves ahead of the pack in channel partner recruitment but will also reap the benefits of those channel partners’ improved effectiveness and higher productivity,” the report said.

Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
Staff Writer, Computer Dealer News

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