LENOVO ACCELERATE — This year’s Lenovo Accelerate is new in more ways than one. For starters, the vendor is sending a loud and clear message to partners — Lenovo lost its way with the channel and is determined to turn that around by making a channel-first commitment. The other noticeable change at year’s Accelerate, is that it’s a combined partner and customer event, unlike in previous years where Lenovo held two separate events.

Big change is often accompanied by shake-up and new blood at the top of the organization. As a reminder, Lenovo had six North American presidents in as many years. Most recently, the company hired Nicole Roskill, executive director, global channels, Data Center Group (DCG), and Kevin Hooper, president of North American Data Center group sales. Both Roskill and Hooper joined Lenovo in February. In Roskill’s case, it was time to establish a new global channel leadership role.

Lenovo’s Nicole Roskill

Channel Futures caught up with Roskill to talk about her new position, goals and the company’s new focus on partners. Roskill’s background includes 12 years at IBM, followed by five years at Avnet Technology Solutions, two with Avnet leading OEM sales, and a short stint in channel consulting.

Globally, about 80-85% of Lenovo business goes through partners. In the U.S., that figure is closer to 50%, largely because the U.S. organization was on a path, over the last couple of years, to build more of a direct organization. That has changed. Kevin Hooper is the new president in North America, and together with Roskill, Lenovo is reorienting its business around the channel.

Channel Futures: What was Lenovo’s thinking behind creating the new global channel role — one that you’ve been in for about 90 days now?

Nicole Roskill: There’s not been a global channel leader at Lenovo. Over the past two years, the executive team has invested in building a channel leader in each of our five geographies. Now that we have those leaders in place, it made sense to put someone in global to think about how we get economies of scale, how we take best practices from geography to geography, and replicate where we’re seeing strength in the way we engage with partners.

For the past 90 days, I’ve been focused on learning our business, understanding the capabilities in each of our geos and starting to make recommendations on things I think will help us to drive a much stronger channel engagement.

CF: What are your job responsibilities?

NR: My primary responsibility is how we start to get greater scale with our partners. We recognize that our success depends on the strength of our partner ecosystem. They’re a critical route to market for us. We need more focus on partners as an extension of our own sales team and we need to think about how we support and engage partners, certainly as we’re focused on building out a more robust portfolio of offerings.

Our partners have tremendous skills sets within their own organizations and our goal is to provide partners with a compelling portfolio on which they can layer their own IP and expertise, and their own unique offering in their market. We must do a better job …

… across this partner journey so that every touch point with Lenovo DCG is positive, efficient and focused on helping partners to mitigate risk they have in their business and grow.

CF: You talk about Lenovo changing course with partners — tell us more.

NR: We have thousands of partners on the DCG side of the business; what we must focus on is how we effectively activate those partners. We need to be having more conversations with partners; we need to be enabling them across the portfolio where it makes sense and where it’s complementary to their own capabilities.

It would be fair to say that we had a number of missteps after 2014 [when Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 business]. In the couple of years after the acquisition, we had some challenges in the way we were working with partners. A good representation of the challenge: We integrated the salesforce of IDG (Intelligent Device Group) and DCG, so we expected a PC seller to also sell a server, and its different engagement, a different selling process, and often, a different decision maker. I think our partners wondered why we had done that and were nervous that we didn’t understand the data center.

We’ve had some rebuilding to do.

We’ve made a channel-first commitment, and what that means is that we lead with partners. This is a recognition of how critical partners are to our success and our recognition that we must be a better partner to them. We must give partners something to build a business on top of. So this is about creating opportunity and giving it to partners. This is about having very clear rules of engagement around when Lenovo would be in the market versus the partner. We have had issues in the past that we’re addressing.

We expect our employees to honor those rules of engagement. If a customer comes to Lenovo asking for a direct quote, even though they’re working with a partner, we’re making the commitment that we will not provide a direct quote to a customer without the partner’s approval, and if the customer decides they want to purchase direct, we will give credit toward their [partner program] tiering.

CF: Talk about this year’s Accelerate being a combined partner and customer event.

NR: This is exciting given it offers our partners an opportunity to host their customers. Prior, the customer event Lenovo Transform was separate; it was held in New York last fall. Accelerate was strictly partners. But here today, you have customers and partners. We have some partner tracks because we want to take the opportunity to have partners here in person, take some training and education. There are also some breakout sessions for customers.

On the Showcase floor, there’s the Partner Zone. Our Velocity transformation initiative focuses on how we help partners have a frictionless experience with us — so, ease of use, and systems and tools that allow partners to interact with us in a very easy way. An example of Velocity, in April we launched, to a select group of partners, a refreshed quoting tool, based on the feedback we got from partners that the quoting process was too cumbersome.

We have seen since April 77% of quotes are delivered in under an hour and 95% of quotes are delivered in under four hours.

CF: What’s your top message to partners here at Lenovo Accelerate?

NR: Partners are critical to us. You’re going to see us show up more. We are listening to partners and we are making the changes to our systems, tools, processes and organization to get geared for partners as our primary route to customers.