Three Principles Will Guide HP’s Channel Transformation—Starting Today

By Christoph Schell, Chief Commercial Officer, HP

It’s often said that change happens slowly until it happens fast—the only constant being change itself. The past few months have been all about resilience. Resilience in how we live, how we work and how we strengthen our organizations against constantly changing market conditions. Businesses, in particular, have contended with a multifaceted challenge: How to provide customers value in the current moment, day-to-day, while also building towards the future.

It’s for this reason that HP is introducing a new global channel partner program, HP Amplify?, that fundamentally shifts how partners engage with our business. First, we will consolidate from several hundred regional and country programs into one streamlined global program. Second, we will establish two easy-to-follow program tracks with clear compensation to eliminate complexity. As a third priority, we will make it easier for HP and our partners to collaborate and build stronger customer insights. These changes will create a platform where partners can better understand our customers and more closely align their business model to customer needs.

Today, most customers value experiences and ongoing outcomes, rather than a transactional relationship. Just think about how social media has engaged buyers and sellers and how the B2B service economy has accelerated everything from security to printing. Now, enterprises are demanding even more innovative solutions from their tech providers. HP and its channel partners have always been on the same team, with the same mission of driving sales and serving customers. Now, it’s time for us to work even more closely. Here are three principles that will guide our next transformation—starting now.

Building Digital Infrastructures with New Capabilities

Capabilities mean having systems and staff in place to respond to changes in the way our customers think about technology. Not long ago, businesses left tech-buying decisions to their IT staff. That made sales relatively simple for HP and our partners—we naturally speak the language of technology and could sell based on product specifications. Now, as we are seeing an increase in requests from customers that are looking for progressive, integrated services-based solutions, traditional, transaction-based partners are less and less a part of the successful go-to-market mix. 

Decision-makers want to know much more than processor speed or how many pages they can print in an hour. They want to know that their technology partners can design an infrastructure that truly works for them, enable a more mobile and efficient sales force, and protect their online systems from cyber attacks, which are continually escalating and evolving. Sellers will no longer succeed by only thinking about the transaction.

Over the past few months in the wake of the global pandemic, acceleration in this regard has been phenomenal. I can’t help but think back to the time when online marketplaces were just beginning to emerge. That innovation had an immediate impact on companies’ future revenue because it made comparing value propositions across an entire category much simpler. The shift we are part of today, as technology solutions become more and more vital to success, has created another tremendous opportunity for partners who can clearly define and deliver on recurring value propositions. Our customers are on a journey—managing huge digital and workplace transformations—and we need the capabilities to walk alongside them.

Collaborating Across the Value Chain

Collaboration with our partners is always ongoing. But in this new world of complete customer engagement, everyone must become smarter with their data intelligence. Partners can do so by drawing from historical price points and satisfaction levels as well as qualitative data on how customers use products. Currently, that information gets siloed among too many stakeholders.

When business customers come looking for transformational technology solutions, we need to be able to apply all of our collective customer insights to the challenge in the most secure way possible. Often, this effort will involve artificial intelligence, which can quickly analyze massive amounts of historic information, then help us develop innovative programs. Of course, we’ll do this in a way that respects both customer privacy and partner security requirements.

At HP, we are fortunate to have earned the trust of our partners over many years, trust that is essential to the creation of next-generation solutions. I’ve always said partners are part of the HP family—that’s how important they are to our business. HP’s commitment to partner collaboration is unwavering and our goal with HP Amplify is to make it simpler for partners to engage with us. We believe this is a key enabler in our ability to maintain the industry-leading, outcomes-based mindset that customers crave.

Modernizing Performance Metrics

Performance is often thought of as the end game in a go-to-market strategy—revenue and the vendor incentive programs are designed around it. Just as traditional capabilities and rules of engagement have been nullified by digital transformation, so too have outdated performance metrics.

Performance must now be measured beyond traditional sales goals. Metrics, including customer satisfaction levels, conversion rates, support levels, account retention and expansion are more important than ever. Our goal at HP is to achieve greater consistency in how we understand customers’ sentiments over time. Once a product or service has been deployed, what is their ongoing experience with that solution? How could the solution be expanded?

HP Amplify is designed from the ground up to measure and reward partners for a variety of performance indicators — beyond sales revenue — such as investing in and improving digital skills, data sharing, e-commerce and omni-experience customer solutions and services capabilities. These are the capabilities and behaviors that we believe are necessary to make HP and our partners thrive and be more profitable. The more capabilities around secure data collection, routes to market, services and specializations, the more access and benefits partners will receive.

We have a unique opportunity to fundamentally reinvent our partner programs and routes-to-market. To set the course for a future where we are defined by the outcomes we enable, not simply the products we sell. And a channel ecosystem with the digital infrastructure needed to take a more sophisticated, customer-insights driven approach to everything we do and ultimately deliver the personalized offerings needed to truly serve each customer as a segment of one.

Capabilities, collaboration and performance: These three areas will define HP’s partner relationships in 2020 and beyond. As we’ve all collectively experienced this year, change is hard and can even be scary. But we must embrace change before we become a victim to it. Our customers are counting on us to do so.