Partners to be Part of All STG Sales Force Deals, States IBM
Partners to be Part of All STG Sales Force Deals, States IBM by UCStrategies Staff
For large enterprise accounts, IBM has stated that it will now move to a co-selling model in order to drive solution providers to distribute more complex IBM solutions to businesses. The vice president of Systems and Technology Group, worldwide channels at IBM, Dave Carlquist, made the announcement recently.
In order to get paid when signing an agreement with a customer, IBM's Systems and Technology Group sales force is needed to work with an IBM partner. Carlquist wrote: “By moving to a co-selling model, business partners become the primary route to market for servers, storage and networking for the majority of IBM's clients.”
Evolving Solutions is an IBM partner based in Minneapolis, and the CEO of that company, Jamie Gmach, said: “This is the biggest change in IBM's channel program in the past 15 years. IBM now has a deep impetus to find the best partners to provide solutions for specific client opportunities.”
Numerous partners who are working with one customer will be kept together by IBM, and this will offer a solution which could include software, hardware and cloud services. Partners and IBM, in the past, tended more to work in silos, according to Gmach.
The co-selling model can improve partner’s strengths and IBM’s strengths with greater effectiveness. Gmach said: “In the past partners might back down from an opportunity for fear of offending another business partner who may be engaged in the same account.” This is not the case any more for IBM, when it helps partners and customers to negotiate sales.
By creating tighter relationships between channel partners and IBM’s Systems and Technology sales team, IBM is continuing its effort to “radically simplify” (as stated last year at the company’s PartnerWorld Leadership Conference) how business is conducted with partners. (CY) Link