Brennan IT founder Dave Stevens says channel chiefs need empathy for the reseller. “The best channel chiefs tend to have an approach where they say, ‘If your client experiences these sorts of problems, then we have this solution here to fix it’. Whereas the majority of them say, ‘We want you to sell 400 units of this, and we don’t really give a damn whether the client needs it or not’, because they are the sales and marketing branch office of a US company, generally.”
One of Stevens’ bugbears is channel programs that incentivise individuals within reseller organisations with prizes for sales volume. “That’s just hijacking our sales teams. The channel chiefs who support that kind of behaviour are really the least likely that we want to engage with.”
A good channel chief must be able to communicate changes in strategy quickly and effectively. Few have had as many opportunities to hone their diplomacy skills as Phil Goldie, Microsoft’s director of partner business and development. We have seen Microsoft enter the tablet and notebook market, develop a cloud strategy that has ripped significant revenue away from traditional reseller business models, abolish a significant revenue bump by giving away Windows 10 free of charge, and most recently open a direct flagship store in Sydney.
“A lot of the traditional business models that our partner ecosystem has participated in for decades are changing quite fast,” Goldie says.
“The thing that we’ve learned is number one, try and be consistent and simple in what we talk about. What doesn’t work well is when the message is overly complex. Not to say we’ve [always] got that right by any means, but we are learning.”
For Goldie, that has meant going beyond the traditional roles of the channel chief to look at ways of retooling partners to adjust to annuity revenue and look at building services on top of Office 365. “If you look at a lot of the training that we now do, it is actually very heavily anchored in business rather than the technology. We still have to do both, but it is the business thing that we invest probably more money in than we have ever done before.”
BREAKOUT: REVOLVING DOORS
Consistency is important to partner principals, usually business owners who are in it for the long haul. It is a challenge when the channel chief, a reseller’s main conduit into the vendor, moves on, but move on they often do. The channel chief role is one that sees regular changing of the guard. We round up some of the most significant movements over the past 18 months.
Apr 2014: Chris Spence, HP
Chris Spence ended a seven-year tenure with HP when he exited in 2014. He had worked in reseller land before HP, where he moved his way up to general manager of channel, South Pacific. He then moved back into the channel with a role at major HP distributor, Dicker Data, and was replaced at HP by Kaaren Lewis. Spence has since joined Adobe as senior executive, strategic accounts.
Dec 2014: Phil Cameron, IBM
Phil Cameron was the first of IBM’s two senior channel personnel to depart Big Blue in quick succession. He left IBM after four years and joined Westcon as director of vendor alliances ANZ in January 2015. Cameron, like another senior channel figure, John Donovan, had mixed channel chief roles with C-level management, having spent almost five years as ANZ managing director for Lenovo.
Jan 2015: Leo Lynch, IBM
IBM’s distribution boss, Leo Lynch, followed Phil Cameron out the door to be director of channel sales for Huawei, a vendor on a rapid growth trajectory in enterprise reseller sales. Lynch’s track record included channel roles at EMC, as well as almost a decade at HP.
Jun 2015: Patricia Nance, Oracle
Oracle alliances and channels vice president Patricia Nance parted way with the vendor after more than five years with the vendor, most of them in channel roles. During her tenure, Oracle ramped up its messaging around the channel, including an announcement that it would shift “thousands” of direct accounts to its partners.
Jul 2015: Klasie Holtzhausen, Symantec/Veritas
Klasie Holtzhausen had been with the security and information management vendor for two years before his departure in July 2015. In his time at Symantec, the company made a series of channel policy shifts, including announcing a new competency model that was swiftly scotched by the decision to split in two. Holtzhausen is now managing director of Dell Software ANZ.
Oct 2015: John Donovan, VMware
One of the longest-reigning channel chiefs of a tier-one vendor, John Donovan resigned from VMware after five years as director of channel sales. He has since moved on to identity management software vendor ForgeRock as its regional vice president, moving back into C-level management; he had previously spent six years as managing director of Symantec Australia and New Zealand.
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