Ingram says most partners don't have a sales plan

More than half of partners don’t have any sales plans in place, according to a survey conducted by Ingram Micro.

The distributor surveyed its partners earlier this year as part of its ‘Cloud Awesomeness’ program, Ingram’s strategy to help partners build out their cloud businesses and sell more cloud-based services.

Ingram’s senior vice president for global cloud channel Renee Bergeron told audiences at Ingram Micro ONE APAC in Singapore on Tuesday that 47 percent of partners surveyed had no business plan, 50 percent of which were MSPs.

At the same time, 56 percent of partners had no sales plan. These partners are in the ‘Build’ stage of Ingram’s roadmap, which includes partners that only take a few cloud services to market and operate their businesses to be more reactive than proactive. 60 percent of Ingram’s partners were in the Build stage when Cloud Awesomeness launched, but that’s now down to 50 percent.

“It’s not really a problem if you find yourself in the Build stage, if you’re a Build partner,” said Bergeron. So long as it‘s just a transitional stage and actually have a business plan to get to the next stage.”

“But being a chronic Build partner, that’s not a strategy because as workloads begin to move to the cloud, there’ll be fewer workloads running on-premises, competition will be fierce, and some partners will face irrelevance. So, you have to make sure you end up on the right side of the great cloud divide and that you separate yourself as a Breadth partner.”

Breadth partners are those that sell more than four cloud services, have automated their back-office processes and focus on advanced sales concepts like repeat-sell, cross-sell and up-sell. The percentage of Breadth partners increased since last year from 30 to 34 percent.

The next stage is Depth, for partners that sell infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and more than 10 cloud services, as well as automated provisioning. Ingram counted 14 percent of its partners at the Depth stage, up from nine percent at launch.

The last stage is Scale for advanced cloud partners that offer self-service for customers, outsourced catalogues and integrated digital marketing. Only one percent of partners had achieved this stage, but that increased to two percent this year. Ingram said these partners see 40 percent more pipeline than any other partners.

Bergeron also shared Ingram’s vision that vendors and ISVs in the future will be able to automatically self-on-board to Ingram Micro’s Cloud Marketplace, which now boasts more than 55,000 channel platforms.

Brendon Foye travelled to Ingram Micro ONE APAC as a guest of Ingram Micro.