Technology Reseller - v25

35 technolog y reseller.co.uk BUSINESS BRIEFING What does the Partner Portal offer me? There’s a huge amount of information available on the Fortinet Partner Portal, including the latest news and updates... sales tools, battle cards and webinars. Its where you can access the Deal Registration dashboard and the links to the online NSC partner training portal. You get details of the latest promotions available via Fortirewards... find a link to the marketing materials... get started on social media with an engagement and amplification tool... find product information and access the asset library and much more. How do we access the Partner Portal? If you are a brand new partner to Fortinet you can register by visiting partnerportal.fortinet.com and signing up. The person who completed the application form becomes the lead admin for your company and can add or edit company users. There’s no limit on the number of users and anyone who needs NSC training must have a login. There are two main areas of our new proposition, the first is giving vendors and resellers the ability to overcome the most frequent and obvious obstacles to progressing a sale which are cost, budget and timing. The second is enabling sellers to convert an opportunity from a short-term one year subscription or renewal to a longer term, typically 3 or 5 year upfront commitment. How do we do this? Often the upfront cost of the equipment for a solution might not have been fully budgeted for by the customer. We simply spread the cost over a period of time which can be anything between 1 and 5 years, with repayments at monthly, quarterly or annual intervals. To address timing or budget issues we can commence the payment stream with a holiday or deferred payment. The customer has the benefit of the solution immediately but does not start paying for it until they have available budget. On the budgeting point, sellers are often told that the customer does not have sufficient Capex budget. But we can overcome this by structuring the finance on an Opex, or operating expense basis. With Fortinet offering such a large range of solutions that work together there are plenty of opportunities for up selling and cross selling across the security fabric portfolio. Organisations can’t keep using separate security solutions that don’t talk to other devices on the network, that require separate management and collaboration tools. The inability to share threat intelligence or synchronise makes threat response times slower. They can really benefit from an integrated, collaborative system of tools that work together to monitor their network, share information and respond to threats no matter where they occur. Forticare 360? Forticare 360 – if you’re already selling 24/7 support with your Fortinet solutions then why not try upselling to Fortinet 360? Powered by Fortinet’s cloud-based analytics platform, Fortinet 360 offers advanced security support and cloud subscription services that pro-actively detect and re-mediate real or potential performance for security issues on Fortigate and Fortiwifi devices. ACCESSING THE PARTNER PORTAL Stephen Martin, Channel Account Manager at Fortinet, explains what the Fortinet Partner Portal offers resellers, the content and tools available, how to access it, who can add or edit users and the url address to register. HOW TO MAXIMISE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES Stephen Martin takes us through some suggestions to maximise your opportunities with the various upsell and cross sell opportunities such as the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiiCare 360, multi-year, switches and APs, or services such as consultancy, pre-sales, training or finance and leasing. OVERCOMING BUDGET OBJECTIONS Chris Armitage from exclusive networks explains how our finance and leasing services works, the cover available, benefits to resellers and customers, how it can accelerate the sales process, how it differs from other sources of finance and who to contact with any questions or enquiries. You can view all the videos in full at: https://www.exclusivelyfortinet.com/how-to/videos/ Stephen Martin Stephen Martin Chris Armitage