BenQ will work directly with you

BenQ has been noticably absent from the channel in the past two years.

CRN caught up with the vendor to find out about its renewed push in the industry ahead of its 2008 roadshow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

CRN: What is BenQ’s current channel focus?

Newton: We put a taskforce together three months ago to revisit the reseller community to find out what they understand and know about us.

I was flabbergasted with what I saw.

The information they had was old, they had no idea what we were doing, the brochures they had were out of date or they had not received them.

We decided that we now want to communicate directly with the resellers.

We will do the negotiations with them directly and find out what their needs are without going through a third party.

It took the resellers by surprise at first because they are not used to vendors working so closely with them, but they are our bread and butter.

CRN: How many resellers do you have onboard?

Newton: BenQ currently has 1000 resellers on its books, of which about 400 are active.

Our aim is to increase that amount to 1000 active resellers.

We want to ensure the communication we have is consistent. We have set up a reseller program with two different levels; authorised and strategic.

Those that belong to the strategic level must trade with us for three months and then they can earn more incentives. The margin is adjustable according to which product they sell.

We have gone back to basics. We make a product, it is our job to sell it and to get the job done. Our core strategy is product and sales.

BenQ is currently paying for the branding in a resellers shop.

We have already taken our first two strategy partners in Western Australia and Newcastle in NSW, and paid for the branding on their kiosk.

CRN: Who are your distributors?

Newton: We have the same distributors as before; Altech, Synnex and Ingram Micro.

There were mixed feelings about us working directly with the resellers, but we do have their support.

CRN: BenQ has been very quiet for the past couple of years, what has the vendor been focusing on?

Newton: We started in 2001 with a bang.

We introduced some amazing, fancy, cool products and advertised in some fantastic magazines.

We started to get some real hype and very quickly became the number one seller in LCDs and projectors.

We acquired Siemens mobile but it didn’t go to plan because most of the production was done in Germany.

We decided to withdraw from that vendor and that cost us a lot of money, but that wasn’t the key issue for us.

The issue was that a lot of work was done by our research and development team.

All our effort went into developing these phones, but they never saw the light of day.

Over the same period our key products didn’t change that much and the designs were the same.

We have now moved everything back in-house focusing on our retail portfolio and we are starting to launch some pretty amazing products.

We have three ranges and 30 new devices including a MID (Mobile Internet Device).

Realistically, we want to have lots of new sexy products to talk about rather than pushing something that wasn’t working.

We decided to withdraw from the market because if it didn’t warrant talking about we didn’t talk about it.

Now that we have a whole portfolio of products in every category it’s time to sing and dance about it.

We felt it was better to walk away and come back refreshed and renewed.

CRN: How does BenQ see itself compared to Asus and Acer?

Newton: They have done a good job in marketing their products and make a good notebook, but all the rest is done externally by other partners.

My aim is to speak to the customer that sells the product and give them what they need to get the job done.

I don’t think about what other vendors are doing, we just want to stay true to our own brand, then the numbers will come.

CRN: What is your message to the channel?

Newton: We are slowly gaining exposure again.

We are starting to push out some new products now and over the next six months and that is exciting for us.

We want to grow opportunities with Telstra and Optus with our MID devices, expanding the brand presence in clever ways, doing things smarter and doing things fundamentally right.

We want to stay in front of the resellers and build up our relationship with them to gain their loyalty.

We are not focusing on the retail sector, we are still doing business with them, but we want to focus on the resellers where we know we can build on our relationship so they don’t end up moving to another brand.