Eaton Striving To Make ‘Bad Axe’ Power Management Partners
“We really want partners, pun intended, to become a ‘bad axe’ when it comes to power,” says David Windsor, senior product planning manager at Eaton.
Eaton set up a battle-axe game at XChange 2019 for attendees to play to make a statement that the vendor wants to take channel partners power sales to the next level.
“We really want partners, pun intended, to become a ‘bad axe’ when it comes to power,” said David Windsor, senior product planning manager at Eaton during an session at XChange. “We really think power is an interesting category. There’s a lot of room to improve and innovate your business and what your customers are doing on a daily basis. We want to be there for you for that entire lifecycle.”
The Beachwood, Ohio-based data center power management specialist, which received a five-star rating in CRN’s 2019 Partner Program Guide, is dead set on helping partners from start to finish drive power hardware, software and services revenue, said Windsor.
[Related: Eaton’s Del Misenheimer: ‘We’re Not Doing IoT. We’re Going To Enable IoT’]
“Supporting the channel starts at opportunity identification, leads, leads generation, going to trade shows with you, going to customer events, doing customer walkthroughs, having a 65 person outside sales force that’s dedicated to supporting you in the channel,” said Windsor. “How do we help you through delivery, implementation and integration services? How do we keep you throughout the whole sales cycle and make sure that we’re funneling that customer to you, and making sure that you own that customer and we’re not stepping in the way of your business – that’s what Eaton is all about.”
Earlier this year, Eaton revamped its channel program from a focus on revenue to a focus on certifications in determining partner benefits. The change in the Eaton Partner Advantage Program was made to lower the barriers to entry for partners looking to do more with the company.
The program focuses “very heavily” on deal registration and protecting channel partners, said Windsor.
“Our program is heavy on helping to keep the margin in your pocket, making sure you’re protected, making sure that your leading with integrations with Cisco, Dell EMC, any virtualization platform that you have incentives with -- we bring power to that equation,” said Windsor. “We’re focused on how we can help you with demand generation and free onsite power assessments. How to help you with MDF co-marketing collateral, maybe some demo units, and how do we make your business make power not a mystery.”
John Miller, support technician for USET, a Nashville, Tenn.-based solution provider, said he was impressed by Eaton’s channel-friendly strategy.
“I’m not an Eaton partner right now, but they seem to be very channel friendly that makes it easier for us to find new customers and make us some more money,” said Miller, who is focused on the SMB market. “Power is very basic. We all need power to work, but Eaton has been doing this for a very long time with software, subscriptions. It looks like they make sure we can apply it across all the different technologies that we’re responsible for. I’m impressed.”
Eaton provides a slew of solutions from UPS and rack PDUs to software and monitoring services. Eaton’s Predict Pulse is a subscription-based remote monitoring service.
“We think monitoring is going to go beyond monitoring in the next few years,” said Windsor. “How can we make your IT manager set up rules and remediation policies so when the power goes out, things automatically happen and trucks roll and services change without the IT manager involved. That’s going to be incredibly important moving forward.”
With 100,000 employees worldwide, Eaton generated sales of $21.6 billion in 2018.