It’s been yet another brutal week for stock markets. Even if you’ve managed to remain calm, it doesn’t mean your customers have. During this economic turmoil, it’s tough for VARs to attract new customers who may be clutching onto their money with a vise grip.
So Synnex just announced a deal with HP to provide validated leads to partners. The distie plans to refine and monitor activities so leads reach the right VAR.
But we’re not entirely in unfamiliar territory right now. Distributors went through something similar after the dot-com bust followed by 9/11. Remember how many distributors used to be around in boom times? But after those events, everything changed, and everyone started talking downsizing and rightsizing and a bunch of jargon that basically meant people lost their jobs.
But something good came out of that period. Many distributors started to look at ways they could improve their business model. It was during those lean times that distributors put in systems to help them become more efficient, such as better lead generating tools through data mining.
Synnex has data mining tools in place, for example, that can help improve lead generation for VARs who may be struggling right now (since many smaller VARs don’t have marketing personnel on staff and spend a lot of time cold-calling customers). Providing validated leads may be one way of providing that value, particularly in tough times.
But lead generation isn’t anything new, so why all the fuss? For one thing, HP says it has more than $68 billion in business out there up for grabs. And it needs the channel to reach those business opportunities. So all this lead generation will clearly benefit vendors and distributors. After all, if VARs aren’t doing business, they aren’t either.
The challenge is generating high-quality leads that have a decent chance of leading to a sale or at least a relationship that could lead to future sales – by matching the right sales opportunity to the right VAR.
While there are critics of lead generation – that it bumps costs up the channel, or that it doesn’t help VARs develop grassroots relationships – there could be quite a few VARs out there wanting to get their hands on some of that $68 billion.
This is where the “value” comes to play in value-added distribution. Surviving this business in lean times has meant differentiating yourself in some way other than price. Eventually, what goes down will eventually come back up. Those left standing will be those who found smart ways to do business while everyone else was panicking.
