The company has already introduced the Attach Plus and Deal Registration plan and announced it is also significantly increasing head count in sales and technical areas to help partners beat Dell and others in the market place at its Americas Partner Conference.
HP will increase its channel resources by 50 per cent to expand its field sales support, specifically in industry standard servers, blades, and colour printing products, said HP CEO Mark Hurd.
Approximately 20 per cent of this spend will be devoted to closing new business opportunities. HP will provide extra business managers, sales specialists and system engineers in this effort.
“We want to work closely together as one,” said Dave Frederickson, vice-president of HP Canada’s solution partner organization.
According to Frederickson, the hiring blitz at HP Canada will drive demand generation and help push the new Attach Plus program.
Attach Plus encourages partners to sell more HP products in an account.
“The attached message is there for partners to up-sell, cross-sell to see higher margins and other incremental sales,” said Heather Kent, director of partner development and programs of HP Canada, based in Mississauga, Ont.
PartnerOne partners under Attach Plus will be paid for attaching CarePaq services if it just sold or delivered with notebooks and desktops, Kent said.
Frederickson said Attach Plus is “catching some eyebrows.” One larger reseller, for example, could have earned an additional $300,000 under the program based on last year’s HP sales.
HP distributor partner Tech Data Canada is already on board with Attach Plus. Rick Reid, president of Tech Data Canada, said every tool his company offers – whether over the Web or on the phone – is ready for the attached strategy. “When someone orders a core HP product, one of our reps makes suggestions on attach. The sales reps can now show a reseller where the tie-ins are. For online there are pop-up suggestions that help partners build an incremental offering,” Reid said.
Dan Sottile, vice-president of Calgary-based solution provider Long View Systems, said his company is well prepared for the Attach Plus strategy. “Our main attach plan on storage moves right into virtualization and we are working on our server infrastructure to move that into consolidation. We are set up for this – we have 327 employees right now and for a Western Canadian VAR that is pretty good,” Sottile said.