Is the channel Breaking Bad?
Steve Kaplan reckons IT dealers could learn a lot from shadier peers - at least as depicted on TV
Hopefully you are all aware of the award-winning TV series Breaking Bad; if not, you really should stay in more. It was a crime drama about a high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook.
There are many lessons for us all in there, even many parallels with the IT industry. Let me explain.
The story of Walter White is that of a man who turns to crime to secure his family's future after hearing he has months to live.
White makes a string of increasingly poor decisions until he becomes a monster who destroys everything he set out to protect, starting with his decision to produce and sell illegal, dangerous drugs.
It mirrors themes in the Bible, and in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. At one point, White hisses at his long-suffering wife: "All of this is about me!"
As the series progresses, White learns more and more about the channels he needs to effectively market his meth.
Even organised crime has a sales channel. The chain of command is likely to be very well ordered in, say, the mafia – at least in movies such as Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco.
It takes time to earn levels of accreditation. If we follow the money up to the top of this hierarchy, we reach the head of heads, or boss of bosses. This particular channel may be enforced with brutality, as the body count of both those films attests.
While nobody is likely to get whacked in the IT channel, there is much we can learn about the types of enterprise where everyone knows you have to kick some money upstairs, but stays happy if they're getting their share.
Take, for example, a new datacentre equipment vendor with a fast-selling product that pleases users. Let's say this box had the ability to create a rush in the "brain" of the network.
Once word hits the streets that you can buy these units, people go wild for it.
Many people may want to become a dealer. But as White learned, you have to choose your partners carefully. White's product was high quality. He thought that was enough.
But White discovered there were more serious problems with some distributors, and they couldn't be wrangled over in court.
You may need a representative who knows the local territory and has controlling links to all the local dealers. But some distributors can be rash and unpredictable at times.
As any follower of vendor-reseller roundtables might note, channel partners can easily become paranoid. If I had a pound for every time I heard partners ask why a vendor isn't keeping them in the loop, I would be a lot wealthier.
You need a distributor whose bosses look after partners, help to train them, and offer them an attractive proposition. Beware any distributor with an overly diverse range of products. How do you integrate them into a holistic service?
White's first major distribution network did at least understand the principles of having a high-quality product, a professional presentation and well-organised distribution. The bosses also policed their channel scrupulously, with any grey marketers and margin cutters soon given a bullet.
If you get the foundations of the channel right, everything can build on that. Trust and understanding, alongside knowledge of where everyone sits in the organisation, are important.
Of course, success will inevitably attract the interest of aggressive competitors who want a piece of the action. So you need to keep thinking up innovations that may enable you to stay ahead of the game.
In Breaking Bad, Walter White became great at inventing automated ways to eliminate the competition. We should all follow that lead, although you might want to avoid the temptation to wipe them all out in a hail of remotely controlled machine gun fire.
I tip my hat to his creativity, but that sort of thing is frowned upon in the IT channel (although there are some vendors I could name who... well, that's another story).
Steve Kaplan is vice president of channel and strategic sales at Nutanix