Wanting to offer its partners better value and to strengthen its overall brand, Lenovo today announced the launch of Club Lenovo, a new rewards program designed for its U.S. and Canadian small to medium business (SMB) resellers.
Today’s launch of Club Lenovo will replace the company’s current Think More, Think New rewards partner program in the U.S. and Canada and will offer business owners and sales representatives a wide array of rewards and incentives.
Stefan Bockhop, director of channel sales at Lenovo Canada, says the new points-based loyalty rewards program has a distinct Canadian feel to it, which makes it an ideal program for Canadian resellers to take part in.
“The rewards that are offered in Club Lenovo are for the products that are successful here [in Canada],” Bockhop said. “We’ve also made sure this is not just a program that pays for sales activities. You can also gain points for participating in education courses and you can also gain points for referring people into our program.”
Bockhop says it’s easy for partners to enroll in Club Lenovo. The program he says, is open to all Lenovo authorized partners and sales managers and all that’s required is the completion of a simple Web profile that Bockhop insists only takes five-minutes to complete.
With the addition of this new program, Bockhop ensures partners that Lenovo’s existing Partner Network along with Lenovo’s business partner and premium partner levels will also still be in place.
Club Lenovo was designed to make the program more immediate and interactive for its members, Bockhop said.
“Club Lenovo gives us an opportunity to better interact with our partners,” he says. “The new program allows us to get in touch with the resellers who are out there selling our products. We wanted to make it easy for our resellers and we wanted to make it instant for them to accumulate points.”
In preparation for Club Lenovo’s launch in the U.S. and Canada, Bockhop says Lenovo representatives and all internal staff members have already been educated and trained. On the partner side of things, he mentions Lenovo will be sending out communication announcements to its partners during this week. In addition, Lenovo will also conduct follow-up calls and meetings with its business partner representatives regarding this program.
“We have about 80 per cent of the [value-added resellers] VARs in Canada,” Bockhop said. “Almost every VAR here participates in the SMB market place and this is who we’re targeting with Club Lenovo.”
Bockhop also says Lenovo is looking to expand in the SMB market space with the help of its channel partners. To achieve this growth, he goes on to say that Club Lenovo will be a continual focus for the company moving forward.
“My message to SMB partners is to take advantage of Club Lenovo and all of the education and materials that are offered with it to help facilitate sales,” Bockhop said. “We’re focused on Club Lenovo and we’ll continue to be focused on this for the next six months at least,” he said.
Lenovo Canada has a Web site dedicated for this program: www.clublenovo.com.
