Lenovo promoting ease of doing business with its partners

Vivek Sharma
Managing Director, India, Data Center Group, Lenovo
 

“In today’s changing business landscape, having a trusted partner network has never been more important. In the past, businesses used to be able to handle one transaction at a time, before moving on to another, but those days are gone. We have first hands experience with this, as we are a channel-first company with 90% of our DCG business coming through our channel partners. That means working closely with our partners and enabling our partners to grow with us.

This gives both parties a long-term and more strategic view for the future, regardless of industry or size. We want to be the partner of choice. As opposed to giving partners the entire portfolio and just telling them to sell, we want to work closely with our partners to give them the tools to focus on their specializations—be it software defined infrastructure or high performance computing.

On our end, we are continually improving our infrastructure and processes to promote ease of doing business with channel partners. We have a couple of exciting announcements to come, including Lenovo Bid Portal and Lenovo Maestro, with both to be launched in early 2019.

We constantly strive to be the technology vendor that will grow alongside channel partners in the changing business landscape. We are committed to revamping the channel experience, helping our channel partners stay relevant and future proof their business through continuous dialogue with our partners to take on board their feedback.

As the Asia Pacific landscape is consistently evolving at a rapid pace, there are a few key factors we keep in mind.

Firstly, we collaborate with industry-leading partners across the entire product lifecycle that provide the choice of solutions to help our customers succeed. We deliver a white glove customer experience while solving the most challenging business problems with future-defined data center solutions built for performance, flexibility, and reliability.

Secondly, we provide the best choice of solutions with our network of strategic partnerships, where we have an open ecosystem of partnership that enables us to offer the best end-to-end solutions. We continuously work on enhancing our data center portfolio that spans servers, storage, converged and hyper converged, networking, hyperscale, software, and services.

Thirdly, we innovate with leading industry partners to strengthen our joint offerings. Our channel transformation strategy is designed to make it easy for partners to grow with us through co-selling, enablement, and co-marketing. We understand our channel partners’ common pain points include lengthy approval times in quotations, administration complexity in claiming marketing funds, navigating volumes of information on poorly designed partner portals, inexperienced partner managers and competing with vendors’ direct sales.       

We are 100% committed to the growth and future of our channel partnerships in India and Asia Pacific. We continually review our partner programmes as part of our goal of promoting ease of doing business with channel partners. We are 100% committed to the growth and future of our channel partnerships in Asia Pacific, and as part of that commitment, we are focused on listening and taking on feedback from our partners. To do this, we created the Lenovo Partner Community to gain insights from partners on three broad areas—channel insights, products and solutions, and marketing.

Additionally, we also participate in channel events such as Canalys Channel Forum, which gives us an opportunity to hear from our channels through the various interaction platforms. We also hold channel kickoffs across the region on a regular basis to gather partner feedback, and see how we can better work with them.

The way vendors and partners have been working has definitely evolved over the years. However, we hold true to four mantras, which has served us well.

The first and most broad mantra is the basis of making it easy to do business. We want to be the easiest partner to do business with, as that is the number one thing that the customers are asking for. To support this, we have three key mantras: co-selling, enablement, and co-marketing.

We approach co-selling by evaluating if there is a solution or area that some new partners want to get into. We look at specializations across regions and countries for competencies, and then we go co-sell and go in front of the customers and work with them.

Enablement is not just about training but also about providing all the tools. For example, our partners talk a lot about simplicity, and how sometimes it takes a while to get a quote from us. As a result, we’ll soon be launching a tool called Lenovo Bid Portal to reduce this waiting time, and provide speedy approvals for our partners to reduce turnaround time and meet customer demands. Additionally, we are continually improving our infrastructure and processes to promote ease of doing business with channel partners.

In the areas of co-marketing, Lenovo DCG’s self-service digital marketing tool Digital Campaign Studio offers our channel partners access to solutions campaigns and co-marketing assets for their marketing efforts on our single platform Lenovo Partner Portal (LPP), in turn enhancing operational efficiency. Together, Lenovo and our partners can create and benefit from the best co-branded lead-generating campaigns, while helping partner speed up their go-to-market activities with customers.

In addition, we also have a newly enhanced Lenovo partner engagement programme for DCG partners, with focus on growth, acquisitions of new customers and solution selling. The programme is simplified and transparent, and has a standardised qualification criterion based on performance and certification. This provides partners with access to our team of skilled technical resources, such as Lenovo Expert Technical Sales, in addition to useful online information.”