Ben Q goes 'Back to Basics' with its resellers

According to Philip Newton, managing director Ben Q Australia, it put together a taskforce three months ago to revisit the reseller community to find out what they understand and know about the company.

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 The information they had was old, they had no idea what we were doing, the brochures they had were out of date or they had not received them,” he said.

“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,” he added.

Newton said Ben Q currently has 1,000 resellers on its books and 400 of those are active.

It has created a two tier reseller program; authorised and strategic. Those that belong to the strategic level must trade with the company 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’s our job to sell it and to get the job done. Our core strategy is product and sales," said Newton.

The company has three distributors; Altech, Synnex and Ingram Micro.

It is also offering to pay for its branding in reseller shops and has so far signed up with two; one in WA and one in Newcastle, NSW.

Talking about why the company had been quiet for so long, Newton said ‘Ben Q started in 2001 with a bang. We introduced some amazing, fancy, cool products and advertised in some fantastic magazines.’

However, after failing to take off in the market with Siemens mobiles it decided to change its scope.

“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 worth 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,” he said.

According to Newton, the company is slowly gaining exposure again.

“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 move to another brand,” he said.

ben hardware q