LAS VEGAS – Bolstered by 10 consecutive growth quarters in its channel business, Hewlett-Packard Co. is adding more sub-programs into its PartnerOne plan.
The company has already introduced the Attach Plus and Deal Registration plan and announced it is also significantly increasing head count in sales and technical areas to help partners beat Dell and others in the market place at its Americas Partner Conference.
In total HP will increase its channel resources by 50 per cent to expand its field sales support specifically in industry standard servers, blades, and colour printing products.
Approximately 20 per cent of this spend will be devoted to closing new business opportunities. HP will provide extra business managers, sales specialists and system engineers in this effort.
“We want to work closely together as one,” said Dave Frederickson, vice-president of HP Canada’s solution partner organization.
According to Frederickson, the hiring blitz at HP Canada will drive demand generation and help push the new Attach Plus program.
Attach Plus encourages partners to sell more of the HP portfolio in a given account.
“The attached message is there for partners to up sell, cross sell to see higher margins and other incremental sales,” said Heather Kent, director of partner development and programs of HP Canada, based in Mississauga, Ont.
PartnerOne partners under Attach Plus will be paid for attaching CarePaq services if it just sold or delivered with notebooks and desktops, Kent said.
Frederickson said Attach Plus is “catching some eyebrows.” One larger reseller, for example, could have earned an additional $300,000 under the program based on last years HP sales.
HP distributor partner Tech Data Canada is already onboard with Attach Plus. Rick Reid, president of Tech Data Canada, also of Mississauga, said every single tool his company offers whether it is Web or on the phone is ready for the attached strategy from HP. “When someone orders a core HP product one of our reps makes suggestions on attach. The sales reps can now show a reseller where the product tie ins are. For online there are pop suggestions that help partners build an incremental offering,” Reid said.
Dan Sottile, vice president at Calgary-based solution provider Long View Systems, said his company is well prepared for the Attach Plus strategy. “Our main attach plan on storage moves right into virtualization and we are working on our server infrastructure to move that into consolidation. We are set up for this and we have 327 employees right now and for a Western Canadian VAR that is pretty good,” Sottile said.
Sottile added that he does not believe the Attach Plus plan on its own would give HP partners a leg up on the direct model, but he said it does make them wide and tall in accounts.
Some of the new hires at HP will be put to work handling the company’s new deal registration plan. Also under this plan will be a demo product program and more a aggressive pricing strategy.
“All partners need to grow and we did some work to encourage partners to go off base and sell new solutions into current accounts or new accounts. That costs money and there is risk and time and money behind that. With the new deal registration program we made sure to put the new resources that are hired aligned for this,” Frederickson said.
Under this plan, resellers can earn between 10 to 12 per cent margins on the back end.
Sottile called the new deal registration plan “fantastic.” He said, “It is going to be widely used by Long View. If you are early on with a customer and you have properly registered with HP you will win that business and you are protected by the vendor.”
The deal registration program has increased Long View’s margins significantly. Sottile could not provide any specific percentages of increase because of the various sizes of the transactions.
