HP Rolls out the Blue Carpet Incentive Program for Partners

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is unifying its Sales Promotion Incentive Fund (SPIF) program  – rewards for partner sales reps – across the entirety of the enormous HP product line. HP’s new Blue Carpet program, part of HP’s PartnerONE partner program, will reward partner reps not just for selling HP technology, but also for upselling, cross-selling and attaching, said HP’s Rose Genovese, national channel program manager.

“We are evolving the current SPIF platform,” Genovese said. “We wanted to bring all sales tools, offers [and] trainings to one spot that was easy to navigate.”

Among the improvements:

• The program now can reward more than one sales rep when they make a Blue Carpet claim.
• Sales reps can earn rewards for completing web-based training sessions.
• Rewards automatically appear in the sales rep’s account. No need to claim them.

The program is the same one HP partners in Canada have been using since 2006. The Canadian partner sales reps have completed more than 100,000 education modules and earned more than $12 million in rewards, Genovese said.

This same program will go into soft launch mode in the United States April 2, 2012, and partner sales reps will have access to the educational modules to earn rewards. Training sessions will last anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, followed by a test made up of five to 15 questions. Partner reps earn rewards based on their score.

In addition, the first 5,000 partner sales reps who register for the program will receive a $20 reward incentive.

Blue Carpet will officially launch May 1, 2012, with the full SKU list available for sales rewards. The more partners cross-sell and attach, the more they can earn, Genovese said.

Redemption options will include a reloadable Visa card and HP products available for purchase. Sales reps also will have the opportunity to invest rewards in stocks and or contribute them to their 401k retirement plans.

“We want to focus on the three things: loyalty and engagement across whole portfolio, intelligence in delivering smarter data to open up greater opportunities and relevance in terms of how do we make it relevant to each partner — narrowed down to the things they are most interested in,” said HP’s Mike Parrottino, vice president and general manager, U.S. Channel Sales and Marketing.  “Some partners are focused on client. Some are focused on imaging and printing. The idea is to consolidate it to one onramp into HP.”

HP last updated PartnerONE in late 2011 with specific improvements for networking partners.