What’s Your Expectation Of A Vendor?

By Dede Haas, CA-AM, Channel Sales Strategist, DLH Services, LLC

Award-winning high-tech sales professional and founder of DLH Services, LLC Dede Haas creates innovative and successful channel sales solutions for vendors and their channel partners. This month, Haas discusses vendor relations with two members of The ASCII Group, a 1,300-member organization of North American VARs, solutions providers, and MSPs offering services to help its members grow their businesses.

A. J. GYOMBER is president of Technology Visionaries LLC (www.technologyvisionaries.com), a Woodbridge, NJ-based IT solutions provider, offering outsourced IT support services to central and northern New Jersey businesses.	VICTOR NICHOLS is president of DENVIC (www.DENVIC.ca), a Toronto-based MSP. The 30-year industry veteran is also director of ITPro Toronto — Canada’s largest IT administrators user group with 1,000+ members.

QUESTION 1: What is the most important thing vendors must do for their partners to have a mutually beneficial business relationship?

GYOMBER: I believe vendors should provide a top-down view of the market for a new partner and provide them a go-to-market strategy as well as education in order to be successful with that partnership. There are numerous experiences with vendors selling you a product and saying it’s the greatest thing ever, but not really telling you how to implement that product or go to market with that product. This holds true not only for products that we use internally but also for products that we would sell to our clients.

NICHOLS: The biggest problem is the onboarding process. A lot of small- to midsize MSPs like to make their purchases on credit cards. We expect business information to be required to set up the account; however, requesting a five-page credit application is unnecessary and burdensome on both sides. If paying by card, this credit data is not required. It needs to be protected, adding cost to both the vendor and MSPs. We’re finding it difficult for a lot of MSPs to get their vendor accounts set up.

QUESTION 2: With your answer to question one in mind, have vendors done this one important thing? If not, why do you think they haven’t?

GYOMBER: I can’t think of any vendors that have really helped us either go to market with their product or thoroughly leverage their products to scale in the form of efficiency. It’s being given a bunch of lumber and some tools and told to build a house. They don’t tell you how to do that. They should be developing best practices and go-to-market strategies for us and spoon-feeding this industry knowledge to ensure we’re a profitable partner.

NICHOLS: Thankfully, a lot of vendors have begun to shorten their onboarding process when dealing with credit card accounts, but others still have not changed and sometimes it just doesn’t feel like they care, due to our size.

—

The ASCII Group is a vibrant reseller community of independent MSPs, VARs, and other solution providers. Formed in 1984, ASCII has more than 70 programs that provide turnkey cost-cutting strategies, innovative business building programs, and extensive peer interaction. ASCII members enjoy benefits such as marketing support; educational information; group purchasing power; increased leverage in the marketplace; and multiple networking opportunities. These programs enable ASCII members to increase revenue, lower operating costs, and grow service opportunities. ASCII is the oldest and largest group of independent information technology (IT) solution providers, integrators and value added resellers (VARs) in the world. Learn more at www.ascii.com.

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2018 issue of Channel Executive Magazine.