Reseller's Report Card: finding ethical vendors

Is your vendor a mate or mortal enemy? It’s a question that often vexes Sam Vakili. The managing director of North Sydney IT solutions provider mcr Computer Resources is always evaluating vendors’ commitment to the channel and the approach of their direct sales teams.

“Ethics are key,” Vakili says. 

“We’ve introduced vendors into deals and the day the registration ended, they pushed us out and registered themselves. 

“We would have had a very good relationship with them at one point but we’ve said we can’t work with a partner who does this.”

He says corporate pressure is corrosive to partnership. “There’s a lot of pressure from head office on [vendor sales reps] to make their numbers so they’re looking at doing it any way possible. They only look at the short-term picture.”

Can a solution partner expect little sympathy from the vendor’s channel team when their reps overstep the mark? “Many just say you ran out of time and the direct guys have gone in,” he says.

But he’s full of praise for Cisco, which he says has “probably the best” partner program in Australia.

“We were in a very competitive situation on an MPLS [multiprotocol label switching, a network technology] deal. We took them in to a very large deal.”

When the customer’s senior management changed mid-way through negotiations and the new CEO brought in Huawei, Cisco stood by mcr. “We had the full support [of Cisco]. They really encouraged the [customer] and talked up our capabilities and we ended up with one of the largest deals of the year. We invested jointly and we had great success. The revenues increased drastically compared with previous years.

“After that deal, we went on to get really good wins [in] unified communications and we’ve had quite a few security wins with the same vendor.”

Vakili says vendors can learn from Cisco’s channel enablement, which stretches from training to online tools and the Cisco Live events. Deal protection and financial support are also near the top of the list, he says.

“They provide a lot of co-marketing and support resource funding. In terms of all the things that make a really good partner program, they seem to have it. They give you price protection if you introduced and registered [the customer]. Rebates as well; they have a very good and mature rebate system. You don’t have to chase things up.”

CHECKLIST

► Vendors who stand by their resellers

► Mature partner programs with easy rebates

×  Unethical vendors who push channel partners out of a deal on technicalities

× Vendors’ sales teams that compete for deals with VARs