NEC helps resellers to focus on vertical sectors

Screen vendor looks to help VARS target specific markets, including medical and financial

NEC Display Solutions will target five key verticals as it attempts to adopt a more “solutions-based approach”.

Last summer NEC unveiled Solutions Partners, its new type of partner status. Solutions Partners can team up with a reseller to provide a specialisation that the reseller would not be able to offer otherwise.

Simon Jackson, sales director at NEC Display Solutions, told CRN: “As we moved more into solutions-based selling we realised we had to be more aware of our marketplaces and the kinds of solutions our resellers were selling. The five verticals are based around our product range and look at who our resellers had been selling our products to.”

The screen vendor will now focus on the medical, colour, financial, transport and digital signage markets.

“We identified five verticals that we felt we could add value in. It will help our resellers to understand what areas we focus on,” Jackson said. “We haven’t invented these verticals. We have been selling into them but haven’t necessarily had a Solutions Partner in each area until now. We now have 17 Solutions Partners on board, and our resellers are really happy with the Solutions Partner approach.”

Liam Slattery, managing director of U-Touch, told CRN: “We became a Solutions Partner about a month ago. If an NEC reseller wanted to make a screen interactive, NEC would put them in touch with us.”

Following a series of reseller race days last summer (CRN, 27 June), NEC said it now has more than 200 resellers on board.

“The race days were a focused recruitment event. We were more concerned with getting the right people, rather than the quantity. However, we’d probably still like another 50,” Jackson said.

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