Lenovo Takes Wraps Off New Channel Program

Purchase, N.Y.-based Lenovo is announcing the news at the PartnerWorld conference it’s sharing this week with IBM in Las Vegas. Key to the new channel program is a two-tiered, two-segment strategy that executives said is much simpler than the program inherited when Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business last year.

"We did it around customer segmentation, which is the cornerstone of the [Lenovo] business model," said Mark Enzweiler, vice president of worldwide business partner sales at Lenovo. "We think it is a very simplified approach."

The Lenovo Partner Network will have two tiers: a Business Partner level and a Premium level. Also being added are new "value incentives," including the Financing Advantage program, aimed at providing one-hour response time on leases to small and midsize businesses via VARs, and an enhanced portal for business partners to access Lenovo product data and other information. There also will be additional spending for co-marketing with solution providers plus more discounts and demonstration products, as well as the "first right of refusal" on service calls as a way to give incentives to solution providers that offer services beyond unit sales.

"If you're adding and driving value in the eyes of that customer, we're going to pay you for those activities," Enzweiler said.

Lenovo's channel strategy will track along with its overall plan to continue attacking the market in segments: a "transaction" segment of smaller customers that primarily will go through the channel, and a "relationship" segment of larger enterprises for which Lenovo will use both channel and direct sales.

Since the IBM-Lenovo deal closed last year, Lenovo channel executives had spoken frequently with solution providers and had signaled as early as last fall their intention to cut out much of the pre-deal, IBM legacy bureacracy. And in an earlier move, Lenovo said its new Lenovo 3000 product line--desktops and notebooks geared for SMBs--could be discounted by solution providers but not by Lenovo's direct-sales force.