HP's Head of Global Channel Strategy Talks Program Changes, Poly Opportunity
HP’s channel strategy leader reveals how HP is tweaking its two-year old partner program, and what to expect for the rest of 2023.
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Channel Futures: Is the More for More incentive more relevant now with the acquisitions of Poly, Teradici and HyperX?
HP’s Mary Beth Walker: Yes, Poly brings maybe the biggest opportunity right now. There might be partners who say they will sell Poly with whichever PC. No, we want them to say going forward, “We want you to buy an HP PC with this.” To make it a better economic and business decision for them to do that. We want to make that as easy as possible for the partners.
CF: And what about the Fast Lane MDF initiative? It seems like that speaks to HP’s efforts to simplify partner engagement.
MBW: There’s a lot of complexity that goes into MDF claims right now. The compliance around that is pretty heavy. “Did they really do this work? Is there an invoice for it?”
But there’s some really good players out there. Some people who … just have a great track record. So the intent is to make it that as soon as they submit an invoice, we pay. We want to be able to pay partners as fast as we possibly can. We’ll look at who are the best of the best from a compliance and behavioral perspective, and we’ll put them in the Fast Lane. Then we’ll look into how over time we can grow the number of partners in the Fast Lane. It should be very attractive to them to try to get their compliance levels to where they need to be.
CF: One message coming from HP is that it could be doing better at certain things – cutting complexity and making things faster for partners. How much has that come from partner feedback?
MBW: Partner feedback to us is probably the largest and loudest voice. I’d rather they tell us, instead of just going and saying, “We’re going to deal with another vendor.” We have some pretty formal closed loop processes around partner feedback, to make sure we’re constantly getting that from them.
Also, our Amplify program has been out more than two years now. Some of that didn’t work the way we thought it was going to, or things have really changed in two years. It doesn’t seem like long but it’s like, “OK, what we decided to design doesn’t work for today.” And there are some pieces of the program that during COVID didn’t really get tested because there was so much demand. There were some things around the comp model that didn’t get tested during that time. So it’s a combination of how things are working and what partners are telling us that are really driving everything that we decide to change.
CF: At the HP Executive Forum last year, there was a lot of talk about HP’s own internal digital transformation. Are you continuing to automate processes to make life easier for partners?
MBW: Absolutely. The tools can be great but if the process doesn’t get changed along with it, we run into problems. So, making sure that those two things go together. The thing that we really try to balance is how quickly and in what scale do we introduce some of those things to partners? Because they like stability. “OK, we just introduced [that] to them two months ago. We have to wait until they’re able to absorb the next thing.” So we try to balance the road map with a real sensitivity to the partner.
CF: That’s interesting given the increasing focus on partner experience (PX).
MBW: We want to make sure that we’re giving the partners everything they need. It’s really important to me and my job. Partner experience is as important as customer experience. Because I need to make sure the more than 85% of our business that goes through those partners, they keep wanting to come back and sell.
CF: Looking ahead to the rest of 2023, November is circled on the calendar for rolling out new partner initiatives. What can we expect?
MBW: We’re going to bring distribution into Amplify. It’ll be a separate program from the reseller program, for a lot of reasons. But it’ll have the same frame; it will be built on performance, capabilities, and collaboration. But there are a lot of things different about distribution. There are a lot more individual pieces, especially now they are starting to do different things. So it’ll be a much lighter level of program.
CF: And sustainability continues to sit at the forefront of your plans, too?
MBW: Sustainability will continue to expand. We need to get to more countries that we’re in. And most of the countries that we’re in right now, it’s only for resellers. What we need to do for retailers is very different. They need a lot better labelling on boxes, how to tell the sustainability story in-store. So that’s what we’ll be focused on [in terms of] sustainability.
CF: And sustainability continues to sit at the forefront of your plans, too?
MBW: Sustainability will continue to expand. We need to get to more countries that we’re in. And most of the countries that we’re in right now, it’s only for resellers. What we need to do for retailers is very different. They need a lot better labelling on boxes, how to tell the sustainability story in-store. So that’s what we’ll be focused on [in terms of] sustainability.
HP AMPLIFY — HP this week revealed how it plans to move forward with partners in 2023. They include a host of channel initiatives scheduled for later this year, alongside a vow to improve HP tools and processes.
HP’s Mary Beth Walker
Channel Futures sat down with HP’s head of global channel strategy, Mary Beth Walker, to dig into what those plans mean for partners. She explained the reasons behind the launches, new partner opportunities and how HP is responding to partner feedback.
Channel Futures: There were some updates made to the Amplify Partner Program announced this week. They included the “More for More” incentive. What was the reason behind that?
HP’s Mary Beth Walker: With More for More, we want to entice partners to work across the portfolio instead of in areas where they’re just used to dealing. For instance, a partner who’s only been selling print, is there a way to have a little extra incentive [to] go into PC? So, we’ll look at how to make it enticing for partners to sell across the portfolio.
See our slideshow above for the rest of our conversation with Walker on the HP channel. It includes a discussion of market development funds, partner engagement, sustainability and more.
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