McAfee Rolls Out Global Profitability Program For Security Partners

In an effort to help promote channel profitability, McAfee has rolled out a series of initiatives aimed at rewarding partners who proactively pursue McAfee security engagements.

’We’re trying to strengthen our relevancy with partners and also drive mutual profitability,’ explained Gavin Struthers, McAfee’s senior vice president of worldwide channels. ’The McAfee Profitability Stack, as we call it, is a holistic approach encompassing six building blocks, validated by our partner advisory councils, to make the value proposition better, richer and quicker for our partners.’

The combined ’stack’ enables Elite, Premier and Select partners to earn additional front-end margin, back-end rebates or sales incentives for a variety of functions involving new or existing business. These functions include upsale/cross-sale, as well as various services and value-added activities.

[Related: McAfee Takes Aim At SMB Security Partners ]

Among the six building blocks, Deal Registration provides as much as 25 percent of additional margin on top of standard channel margins to reward partners who come to the table with incremental new business or suite upgrades. In a similar fashion, the ’Incumbency Advantage’ component supports additional margin on the first round of license renewals, providing an advantage against competing partners attempting to take the account.

’We’re very glad that they are revamping deal registration,’ said Andrew Plato, president of Anitian Enterprise Security, a Portland-based McAfee partner. ’In the past, registrations were getting declined and even poached by the direct reps. This made us very hesitant to register larger deals. Hopefully, this changes all that.’

In the area of post-sales rebates, McAfee will now issue a weekly tracking report designed to streamline the administration of these incentives. Also, the Accredited Channel Engineer incentive rebate is now available globally.

At the individual level, the Rewards program provides partner sales representatives and engineers with a variety of cash and prizes, including quarterly Top Performer payouts of $25,000 for SMB Endpoint and $35,000 for Commercial Endpoint. Current participants can now earn up to $500 in referral bonuses.

NEXT: Revised Teaming Plan

A revised Teaming Plan is designed to stimulate close sales cooperation between McAfee and its partners by providing additional deal protection and margin, as well as a streamlined approval process.

’The teaming plan was trialed in North America with our enterprise business around larger deals,’ explained McAfee's Struthers. ’We sat down with the partner and agreed on how to work an opportunity together on behalf of the customer. We’ve now expanded that to reach downward into the high end of SMB. So if the partner runs with the opportunity and adds value to the sales cycle as we expect them to do, we will reward them with additional margin. We recognize the value of the partner, so we bring them in early in the cycle and give them the protection that they need to preserve their margins.’

Also, newly tiered pricing maps to the company’s SecurityAlliance program, supported by a new automated pricing process that augments the resellers while also easing the administrative burden on distributors.

’This goes a long way towards motivating the channel to pursue new business with them,’ said Jeb Carter, president of Torch Security, a Dallas-based McAfee partner. ’Especially in these lean times, we’ve seen some channel programs implode because the vendors were putting the squeeze on partner revenues. But, this plan moves the incentives up to the front lines.’

The various components are stacked upon one another in order to fully reward the company’s most loyal and proactive partners.

’We've also built a stack calculator that the partners can access on their portal,’ added Struthers. ’If they generate 'x' number of deals and add in specific other components, this calculator will tell them how much margin to expect.’

PUBLISHED JULY 11, 2012