HP Tweaks Channel Sales, Dangles Incentives To Enterprise Partners
HP has altered the way it handles joint HP field and partner sales calls: Going forward, HP Americas channel sales reps will make a minimum of 2 joint calls a week with partners, supported by HP and partner demand generation programs.
HP's new Enterprise Business Portfolio Incentive, which runs from April 1 through Oct. 31, rewards partners for including multiple different ESSN product categories within a single customer order. The incentive gives partners a three percent discount for selling products in two ESSN categories and a five percent discount adding three ESSN product categories to a deal. Products from HP's Servers, Storage, Networking and Services groups are all eligible to be bundled in deals.
Also of interest to partners is HP's Enterprise Business Top 500 Competitive Accounts Incentive, which will run from May 1 through Oct. 31, and gives partners a five percent discount for deals encompassing enterprise server and storage, five percent for technology services deals and 10 percent for networking and software deals.
HP says existing programs like Catalyst for Change, a trade-in promotion launched in December that gives partners 20 percent up front discount on HP A-Series and E-Series switches when they trade in an eligible Cisco switch as part of the deal, will remain in effect.
HP is also touting the progress it has achieved with Selling through Curiosity, a sales training program launched last year that now has more than 1,000 partner sales representatives. HP is now delivering the program virtually as a way to get VARs up to speed and maximize their field selling time, and the company had added new sales collateral libraries that include playbooks, video testimonials, automated white boards and presentations.
ESSN is one of the fastest growing areas of HP's business at the moment. In HP's fiscal Q1, ESSN division revenue rose 22 percent year-over-year, led by blade server revenue growth of 23 percent. HP's enterprise switching and routing revenue grew 30 percent during the quarter, and in HP's Q1 earnings last month CFO Cathie Lesjak called this "a good proof point" that networking is contributing to HP's growth.