Tell me about how HP deal registrations work
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@Dashrender said:
The main problem I see with deal registration is the attempt to lock someone into a vendor through hardware, a commodity part. The part the vendor/VAR/SI should be getting all their real cash from should be their services, not the sale of the hardware.
The problem there is that you disagree with the concept of resellers, not the ecosystem itself. It's the right tool for how reselling works. If you don't like this concept, you simply don't work with resellers and go directly to the vendor in question.
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@Dashrender said:
I say this because unlike Scott, I've rarely found real value in what the VAR provides. I give them my laundry list of things I've done my own research on, and Scott says that they should now come back and confirm that all of my parts work together, but I've been burnt on this more times than I care to admit. Do I blame the VAR? Nope, I gave them the list, and sold me that list. According to Scott, I should be shopping around for another VAR, because someone out there is willing to provide the verified will work together work as a double check to my own work as part of my purchasing through them.
Correct, if your reseller is not a good partner, they should not continue to be your reseller (within reason.) They really have only one job to do, and that's what you say that they are not doing. So if they are not doing the one thing that you are giving them business for, why continue to give them business?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
or, the partner usually has a set period of time to close the deal. During this time other channel members, or even the vendor's
The main problem I see with deal registration is the attempt to lock someone into a vendor through hardware, a commodity part. The part the vendor/VAR/SI should be getting all their real cash from should be their services, not the sale of the hardware.
Part of the problem here is that making the hardware sale often is what determines who gets the support business. Getting the lowest price is necessary to win the project to get the support work. So whether you like the reseller concept or not, most companies give their support dollars to the company that wins the hardware sale. So this deal registration is part of that, too.
If you don't like this system, you need to change the thinking of IT buyers across the globe.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
or, the partner usually has a set period of time to close the deal. During this time other channel members, or even the vendor's
The main problem I see with deal registration is the attempt to lock someone into a vendor through hardware, a commodity part. The part the vendor/VAR/SI should be getting all their real cash from should be their services, not the sale of the hardware.
I say this because unlike Scott, I've rarely found real value in what the VAR provides.
Same here. Sounds like you should move to the UK where you're not locked in and can shop around.
Although I'm coming up with my own shopping list, I expect the reseller to check that it is workable. If it turns out not to be, I would expect them to make good. I believe they have a responsibility to ensure the parts work together.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
If it turns out not to be, I would expect them to make good. I believe they have a responsibility to ensure the parts work together.
They do have that responsibility.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Same here. Sounds like you should move to the UK where you're not locked in and can shop around.
Doesn't that cause VARs to be far less likely to do a good job? Once you shop around, you are going for low price, not service. If you value service, you go with who has been giving you good service. Once you start shopping around, the VAR drops the VA and becomes a reseller and all responsibility is gone.
You can't shop around and expect the value add, the two are exclusive.
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The entire concept of shopping around (other than a first time purchase from which there is no basis for continuity or the time when you need to switch vendors) is to leave the idea of service behind. Shopping around fundamentally means that you aren't valuing service. Actions speak far louder than words. If HP doesn't act the same in the UK as they do in the US, then the HP ecosystem fundamentally is one based on price rather than on service value.
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Not really. Both are important. They're not mutually exclusive. I have two or three preferred VARs, carefully selected because of their winning combination of price and service. I'm monogamous when it comes to women, but not VARs. If anything, I believe I get better service when the VARs know that my business isn't guaranteed.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Not really. Both are important. They're not mutually exclusive. I have two or three preferred VARs, carefully selected because of their winning combination of price and service. I'm monogamous when it comes to women, but not VARs. If anything, I believe I get better service when the VARs know that my business isn't guaranteed.
Having worked on the other side of the fence, I guarantee you do not get the best service compared to their loyal, trusted customers. We get so much better deals and service when our partners know that we are partners, not customers. It's a totally different world how things work when you are a team. Our VARs know that their business is not guaranteed too, but they also know that we aren't playing VARs against each other to get to the lowest price, we put value on the service and they know that they get to keep providing that service by doing a good job consistently.
If you split between several, you also eliminate your volume advantage with all.
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I've worked on both sides of the fence, and still do.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've worked on both sides of the fence, and still do.
So you understand that not having to compete for customers but having an open, trusting relationship and larger volume provides for more opportunity to do good work. It just enables more. It provides better trust, partnership, information sharing, cost advantages, efficiency, etc. There's just no way to keep margins as lean as possible without that monogamous, trusting relationship.
For example, the quote process alone means that if you have three vendors that you go to, each has to quote three times. If that is twenty minutes of work to generate a quote (which is reasonable for a simple order) then you turn twenty minutes of labour into an hour. So if $20 of cost of each purchase goes into the quoting process then for someone shopping around it has to be $60. That's three times the unavoidable overhead.
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We actually reduce that further. We rarely get quotes, we just order. A good relationship means that you can do that stuff, no need to verify quotes ahead of time. So our back and forth is reduced allowing that $20 overhead to get knocked down a tiny bit, maybe to $15 and the process to move much faster.
There is a reason that we can get really good prices on hard to get parts and have them in our hands in two hours while others struggle to get quotes in a day and still don't get the same price that we get.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Same here. Sounds like you should move to the UK where you're not locked in and can shop around.
Doesn't that cause VARs to be far less likely to do a good job? Once you shop around, you are going for low price, not service. If you value service, you go with who has been giving you good service. Once you start shopping around, the VAR drops the VA and becomes a reseller and all responsibility is gone.
You can't shop around and expect the value add, the two are exclusive.
This is a double edged sword. According to this logic if I'm paying $800/month for fiber ISP for X bandwidth, and it's not having any issues, what you're saying is that I should never shop around looking for a better deal. Of course if I didn't I wouldn't know that additional competition in my neighborhood has causes prices to have lowered and I'm just the idiot who continues to pay the high price.
Places like CDW come to mind. I bet they used to have really good prices, and only offer what people really wanted, when they wanted it, but now days their prices aren't that good. So if I don't shop around I won't know that.
I believe in real capitalism - supply and demand. One company makes a great product, starts ratcheting the price to high, so someone else comes along and makes the same, or nearly the same for lower, while still making a profit, etc etc until the price basically hits the lowest price that makers are willing to sell for while being the highest that the consumer is willing to pay.
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@Dashrender said:
This is a double edged sword. According to this logic if I'm paying $800/month for fiber ISP for X bandwidth, and it's not having any issues, what you're saying is that I should never shop around looking for a better deal.
An ISP is not a business partner, nor is it an VAISP. It's a utility service and not related to the discussion at hand.
I've said many times that you absolutely shop around resellers, but not VARs.
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@Dashrender said:
Places like CDW come to mind. I bet they used to have really good prices, and only offer what people really wanted, when they wanted it, but now days their prices aren't that good. So if I don't shop around I won't know that.
No but they famously provide terrible service, so you should have been shopping around not to get a lower price but to get a good value in that case.
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@Dashrender said:
I believe in real capitalism - supply and demand. One company makes a great product, starts ratcheting the price to high, so someone else comes along and makes the same, or nearly the same for lower, while still making a profit, etc etc until the price basically hits the lowest price that makers are willing to sell for while being the highest that the consumer is willing to pay.
Absolutely, but you have to include the value of services and relationship. Capitalism applies 100% and it is the very factors that you mention that make long term partnerships and relationships so important - because that's the means to getting the best value.
that does not imply that you stick with bad suppliers, it means you find a good one and you stick with them.
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That service only has real value if you are a volume purchaser. If you're a one off buyer like I am, the VAR is little more than a reseller - I'm not buying enough for them to care.
Considering that NTG doesn't resell, I'm surprised you have these relationships yourself. If your customers don't have their own VAR already in place, of course you can steer them toward a VAR you've used in the past - I guess if you do that long enough and with enough volume, the VAR will recognize your value to them.
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@Dashrender said:
That service only has real value if you are a volume purchaser.
This is not true at all. You are taking your personal experiences that have been a problem, assuming that the issue is volume and then applying that to the category. There are good VARs that take care of you regardless of your volume.
The more volume you can bring the better the relationship can be simply because everyone has more money to work with and more efficiency all the way from you to the OEM Vendor.
But the idea that your small volume means you can't have a good VAR relationship is simply not true.
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@Dashrender said:
If you're a one off buyer like I am, the VAR is little more than a reseller - I'm not buying enough for them to care.
Caring is not the issue. The real problem that comes in is that you fall out of their cache, so to speak. A large volume customer will have a rep that they talk to all of the time and they know each other and know the needs and can have quick, meaningful conversations.
You can have this same kind of relationship if you work through an MSP. I always mention this. Both there are VARs that will take care of you at any volume and there are mechanisms to make sure that your small volume is never a factor to a VAR regardless of point one. I don't think that anyone under a medium sized business should be dealing with VARs directly in any case. VARs are useful when working with large departments or MSPs. VARs are party of your MSP/ITSP ecosystem, ideally not someone you would interact with directly.
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@Dashrender said:
That service only has real value if you are a volume purchaser. If you're a one off buyer like I am, the VAR is little more than a reseller - I'm not buying enough for them to care.
Same here. But even with volume, if a VAR has a customer that it knows will never shop around and will only ever buy from them, it's natural that that VAR might get a little complacent over time. A bit of loyalty is ok, but you also need to keep them on their toes. It's like marriage, can you honestly say you always treat your spouse as well as you did when you were just dating, or do you sometimes take them for granted. If my VAR doesn't buy me flowers any more, I might start flirting with someone else.
