Learning to increase profits

“It’s more a fact that you have to get the salespeople trained to do these ‘mini-audits’ in their head,” he said. But of course the vendor is backing this up with advancing technical training such as a new network security program to be rolled out in the new year. NETGEAR plans to run that course in each of the major capitals once a quarter to make sure resellers have a a good foundation on the NETGEAR wireless product. It’s a one- or two-day course covering security basics from a broadband perspective.

A sure winner

Speaking of security, have you considered moving up the value chain with security services? You have to be certified to play in this space and Peter Croft, MD for Clearswift in ANZ emphasises the advantages he has over competitors because they are the “IP originators” for the product and have better access to product engineers at head office.

He also makes the important point that getting fully certified in his solution increases the reseller profit. “Without it you might have to rely on the vendor to do the services and implementation. By doing the service delivery yourself you can make full margin recovery on it.”

Clearswift is big on pre-sales training: “If they know the product well they can make more sales of more product more easily”.

The basic training is all done online with online exams, but the vendor also offers instructor-led training for the higher, engineering-type certifications. It’s done on a quarterly roadshow basis or if you are a large enough partner (or even an end-user) you can ask for specific training he said.

If you are feeling more adventurous you can start to position yourself for the growing demand in IP telephony.

Anne Wrencher, channel and operations manager for Mitel said the IP-PBX vendor is busy developing even more training offerings for resellers. Once you get past the company’s pre-requisite LAN/WAN test, a whole world of learning awaits. To ease the way for new resellers Mitel has reduced what used to be a two-week introductory course down to one week face to face and then a follow-up week online which you can do self-paced.

This one-week course will equip you to install standalone Mitel telephone solutions, the additional week extends that with specialities such as for contact centres or for Mitel Enterprise Manager so you can manage multiple nodes from a central location.

There’s also a library of online self-paced learning programs covering things such as teleworking or if you’re a committed reseller the company will look at specialised training for your people.

Bruce Coulthard, systems engineer at Quantum, the first of the two storage vendors we spoke to said the partner portal has plenty to meet the hardware, software, installation and deployment needs of resellers to help channel players “understand the brand and uphold the Quantum product in the right light”. The company also runs sales and pre-sales certification courses – a half-day for sales and one-and-a-half days for pre-sales so they can understand the granular issues of tape library installation, sizing and the like.

At NetApp, channel sales manager Nick Russell said the big push to increase Australian channel sales so they are in line with international company benchmarks means there’s “a big push on the reseller community” at the moment. So much so that this year saw the company boost its training headcount from one to three, adding a technical partner advisor to travel the Oceania, running three-day pre-sales or pre-sales technical training covering issues such as security and virtualisation. NetApp also added a trainer to focus on post-sales implementation training. Again Russell point out the business value in getting those services dollars, but the delivery courses are longer than the sales courses at a week for a standard certification or a full nine-day course to bring you up to the same level as the company’s own professional services engineers. NetApp plans to run that a couple of times a year. As part of the new-found commitment to the channel, the company is also offering all this, including the online NetApp University for free.

Whether its WAN acceleration, security, telephony or remote access, there’s a course you can do, usually supplied free.

By Adam Gosling