Xerox is launching its first deal registration
program, a move that comes just a year after the company announced plans to expand
its partner program to include VARs and introduced
a product lineup to support them.
"The program protects deals for our partners and adds a margin
enhancement," said Tom Gall, director of value channel marketing for the
copier and printer giant.
Xerox is using Blueroads for its deal registration program. Partners log in to
Xerox's partner portal and then log in to a dealer network. Deals are approved
or denied based on whether they are already in the pipeline or not. But Gall
said simple account ownership would not be enough to exclude a partner from any
given deal.
Xerox deal registration is so specific that a deal could be for a sale of 12
multifunction printers to a specific workgroup within a specific division of The
Coca-Cola Company, for example, Gall said.
"We are looking at the specific deal down to the department and product
level," he said.
If one partner registers a deal and another partner sneaks in and outbids the
first partner, the first partner would still receive the reward and the second
partner would not, according to Gall. Also, once a VAR
registered a deal, Xerox would not give bid support to another partner working
that same opportunity.
Gall said the company is introducing deal registration now because it's become
a common component in so many partner programs.
"We are the first to do it in imaging," he said, "and a lot of
our partners have been asking for it."
Xerox's traditional partners have come from the imaging space, but in 2007 the
company launched an initiative to recruit 600 VARs from the computing space. Those
new VARs are more accustomed to programs such as deal registration, Gall said.
"Our new deal registration program shows that the channel is important to
us and we are listening to the channel," he said. "We want to make
sure they keep coming to Xerox. The channel is strategic to us going
forward."
Deal registration is up and running at Xerox for the company's Gold and
Platinum level partners.
"We are promoting this to the subset of partners that are most key to us
today," Gall said "We have a finite number of licenses. But that
doesn't mean that other partners can't apply."
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