Westcoast launches initiative to help HPE partners 'punch above their weight'

Distie establishes in-house team of experts to help partners navigate partner programme

Westcoast established its new Technology Solutions Expert (TSE) initiative to help HPE partners utilise the vendor's partner programme to win more business, according to the distie's commercial head of its Technology Solutions division.

Wesley Lawrance told CRN that the new scheme would "level the playing field" for partners by assisting them in how to best navigate new areas of HPE's portfolio and providing them with skills that will allow them to go after more opportunities.

"We are very keen to grow the business but to do that we have to attract new partners and make working with the vendors that we represent easy," he explained.

"For example, if HPE partners are already selling other vendors or are competing with those that are selling other vendors, we can level the playing field in terms of speed to market, technical capability and understanding a partner programme, so that they have an equal opportunity to win their business with that end customer as any other partner would."

The TSE initiative was born out of feedback from partners who felt that if they weren't a "strongly established" member of the vendor's partner programme, they "didn't have a chance" of winning new business, Lawrance continued.

"A big aim of the initiative is to make sure that we can prove that anyone can win with the right engagement and if they make the right commitments to us as a distributor, that we can help them to be successful," he said.

"The key thing is that it allows them to punch above their weight. We're seeing some good successes where they're up against another partner that's a close competitor of HPE's; where we can work together and make sure that HPE is winning in the opportunity ahead of a Dell or a Cisco."

The TSE is not designed around any particular partner type, according to Lawrance. It is applicable for resellers who have just set up and who want to become HPE partners and for more established partners who want to specialise in new areas of the HP portfolio.

"[It's for] anyone who's looking to change what they do or how they sell and really modernise their sales processes and approach to their customers," he explained.

The initiative came after Westcoast last year reviewed what needed to be done to continue to make distribution relevant and valuable to the channel over the coming years.

"We found a hell of a lot of market research and anecdotal partner feedback around complex technologies being too difficult. That it's too hard to find an entry point into selling things around the edge, IoT or AI," he said.

"It put people off and meant that they ended up going back to what was safe and what they were comfortable already doing. TSE provides the experience and knowledge that partners may not have yet, but the aim is that we would help to enable them and get them up to speed in time."

HPE was chosen as the pilot vendor for the initiative due to its wide-ranging portfolio, which partners can sometimes find "daunting" when trying to move into a new area of the vendor's offerings. There is also a demand from partners who want to move into new areas but are wary.

"It has never been more complex; the way that we sell now has evolved massively over the last couple of years and for a partner who wants to diversify their sales portfolio it can be quite daunting," Lawrance acknowledged.

"It's an initiative that we've driven because we think there is scope to do more - the demand is definitely there from the partners."

Lawrance was confident that there is a possibility of widening TSE beyond HPE and including other vendors in the scheme.

"I don't think there's anything stopping us from extending it out, I think, we'll use the learnings of this and potentially it'll be something that we then translate across the business," he said.

"But right now, I think we see enough of an opportunity in the market that we'll go and do what we want to do with HPE first and assess things as we go. Certainly, in the future there's going to be huge opportunity elsewhere."