technologyreseller.co.uk 27 distributors whose salesforces we visit every single day than it is to resellers. On reseller sales floors, if a portal is hard to access or not relevant or accurate, very quickly resellers will say we don’t want to engage with this. At a country level, we’ve conducted user acceptance testing within distribution to make sure that when we do put it in front of resellers, we can be confident they’re not going to regret the engagement. “The next step, in Q2, is to trial deployment with a handful of resellers. The theory is that everything reseller salespeople need to know to promote a product will be at their fingertips, 24/7. That’s important because the ExCos of resellers don’t want their salespeople to spend too much of their time phoning vendors and distributors to find out the information they need to sell a product; they want them to be on calls with their customers. The more we enable that process and the easier we make it to access all the information those reseller salespeople need when they’re going through the sales process, the happier the reseller ExCo will be because the salespeople are doing what they’re paid to do.” In the meantime, Acer is having to contend with the same challenges as other PC vendors, from the impact of geopolitical events on supply chains to the effects of RAM and CPU shortages on stock levels, lead times, prices and, of course, customer demand. “We are going to have to be very, very agile as the market proceeds and as things develop, because it’s so uncertain what’s going to happen, in terms of supply and demand,” says Booth. Another reason why an accurate, responsive partner portal is such a benefit. we’re very realistic about where we sit in the ecosystem. Of course, compute devices are incredibly important and endpoint devices are incredibly important – nothing gets done without them – but equally we know they’re not the only consideration when people are managing their IT infrastructure.” Partner portal To help channel partners make the most of the opportunities presented by its technology offering, Acer is launching a new partner portal that is also designed to give them a better, more streamlined service. So how does this differ to what’s been available before? “We did have a partner portal, but the maintenance of that partner portal was very difficult,” explains Booth. “It was managed locally and refreshing the content was done country by country, which is hard to do consistently and to do well. Now, we have a partner portal that is populated using a variety of clever tools. There’s a little bit of artificial intelligence in there and there are many different value points that a reseller can get access to concerning pricing, product information, deal registration, trade-ins and all the different programmatics we have that we didn’t have before. “It’s a simple tool to engage with and navigate. We can say with a very high degree of confidence that there won’t be any information on there that is misleading. If a reseller salesperson or a distribution salesperson goes to the portal, the chances are they will very quickly be able to find what they’re looking for. “We deployed it to distribution in Q4 because it’s easier to deploy to two SOHO and SMB is another segment where we think we can mobilise pretty efficiently and where we are already creating a lot of velocity with our distribution partnerships. Resellers in the SMB segment don’t get a lot of TLC from OEMs and we can mobilise and pay attention to them in a way that others maybe can’t,” he says. “Serving that market isn’t so much of an infrastructure play. Those kinds of customer aren’t necessarily looking for a domainable PC and they don’t necessarily come to market with a predetermined idea of what they want to buy. They might say ‘I need a bunch of PCs’ or ‘I need to give a new employee a PC and they’re starting on Monday morning’. That’s what I mean by velocity. You need to be responsive and able to say ‘I’ve got a product that fits your budget and your needs’ because it’s quite an urgent purchase cycle. It’s not tendering for 12 weeks, making a decision and then deploying in 12 weeks. It’s a case of ‘I need a PC and I need it now’.” Core strengths Booth adds that as a brand Acer has some core strengths that serve it well in addressing business markets. “We have a competitive product, first of all, and I think that’s really important. Our challenge is not do we have a good product that could compete with the other enterprise and mid-market players. Our challenge is persuading people that we have a great product and a product that competes, both from a technological point of view and from a price point of view. “Our product is very reliable. And we own our own service, which is really important in the commercial sphere. We have an organisation that was spun out of Acer’s services infrastructure called Enfinitec, which fundamentally is still an Acer company. We own the service infrastructure across Europe to be able to support all our partners. When you sell to a consumer, 90% of the decision, maybe more, is predicated on what the device is they’re buying and how much it is costing them. Larger scale organisations have to think about in-life management of that device and that is a much bigger percentage of the decision‑making process. “And we are channel-only. There’s a virtue in that. We must respect the role that Acer or any computing manufacturer plays in the entire ecosystem of running IT infrastructure in an organisation. Working closely with the channel means PCs
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