Symbol Channel Chief: We Have Seen The Channel Light

After returning from the brink of financial turmoil, thanks to the efforts of a new management team, Symbol Technologies once again is recruiting resellers as it looks to expand into new vertical markets. In an interview with Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, Symbol Vice President of Worldwide Channels Jan Burton details the changes that have led to a re-engineering of Symbol's go-to-market strategy and outlines the critical role the channel now plays in the company's thinking.

CRN: Given all the changes at Symbol, what are your goals with respect to the channel?

Burton: We had set an objective to reach 75 percent of our business through the channel. We are now at 68 percent, up from about 42 percent three years ago.

Two years ago, we announced PartnerSelect, which was the first real authorized [channel] program in our industry. In the bar-code mobility space, it had always just been open access. We announced the first program, [and] a lot of our competitors have since followed. Last month, we announced our first revision to that. We've tried to simplify the program and create more value at the higher level so the premier partners can see very clear differentiation as they move up to a higher status. We also added a lot more benefits to the program in terms of marketing and technical enablement programs and we introduced an ISV program. ISVs are very important to Symbol because we are going with a vertical go-to-market approach.

CRN: What are those vertical markets?

Burton: Retail, travel and transportation, warehouse distribution, health care, government and manufacturing. We have a lot of solution partners in our portfolio who do resell hardware and they write software applications. But we also had a lot of software writers who basically didn't fit very well into PartnerSelect, so we formalized a program for them with two tiers just like the rest of PartnerSelect. We're creating this ecosystem where they can work in conjunction with the other partners.

CRN: Is Symbol planning on growing the number of partners it works with in the channel?

Burton: We have an entry level of partnership that we call an authorized reseller. It has very low commitment numbers. And that number of partners is continuing to increase. The managed partner level, which is for a business partner on a premier level, has decreased with this latest version of the program. We're also trying to recruit new VARs particularly for some of the vertical markets that we don't have high penetration in. And that would be health care, government and manufacturing. The expansion in our partner [ranks] would be to cover other markets that we don't have salespeople covering or that our partners today are not covering. We're working with our distributors to help recruit new partners.

CRN: What are you doing to train VARs who sign up with Symbol?

Burton: We do lots of training and education on those verticals, in addition to training on the products and the platforms to help our partners get certified and up to speed. We've got very robust Web training, but we're also putting in hands-on things like RFID, where we can teach our partners how to implement these kinds of solutions. We've also got a professional services organization that has completely changed what they are focused on. In the past, we did the professional services business. Two years ago, we stated that we were going to turn that business over to our channel partners. So we have changed our professional services team into a group to train our partners. For example, we're actually bringing a partner in to teach them about RFID. We're having them ride along with us so the channel partner can be there to learn with us.

CRN: Has the Symbol sales force also been refocused?

Burton: It changed massively. It's completely revolutionized. They used to be direct, and they used to compete against our channel partners. Today we call them high-touch, and their job is to work in conjunction with channel partners. And then we've hired a bunch of what we call territory managers who are responsible for either an industry in a geography or they're responsible for a whole geography. They've been told they can't do it any other way but with partners.

CRN: What other changes have taken place in the organization?

Burton: I joined two years ago so I'm part of the new team. I will say if you are a Symbol employee of old, one big change is our channel-centric go-to-market strategy. That was very much the plan of [CEO and President Bill Nuti] and his executive team as they came in. It was the only way we felt like we could grow. We couldn't scale a sales force fast enough to do it by ourselves as we wanted to expand around the globe and into these new verticals. So it's a whole new world. Part of my job is to train everyone in the company on what being partner-centric means. It means that product division has to change. It means that operations needs to change. It means every cog in the wheel has got to change. And that's been a big piece of my job, which is teaching people what they didn't even know they didn't know about channels. I've got some channel development people whose responsibility is to work with the product divisions, and in the product development cycle, we are now thinking about what our channel strategy is for that product.