How much money are you leaving on the table?
Kirk Robinson, vice president of North America Channel Marketing at Ingram Micro, posed that question to a roomful of VARs March 15 at the distributor’s VTN conference in Nashville.
If you’re not taking advantage of license renewals and warranty extension and refreshes, you likely are leaving a lot of money on the table, he said.
The distributor’s Ingram Micro Reseller Portal integrated contract tracking software last April from MaintenanceNet that enables participating VARs to track renewal opportunity of participating vendors and swoop in for easy money, said John Fago, director of sales for Ingram’s VAR South division.
“Why go hunting for a new sale when you can make money off of something you already sold,” he said. “You have the chance to make recurring revenue and get to that customer before someone else does.”
Of the VTN members present, 172 VARs are using the portal to track renewal opportunities and “in the next 90 days, those 172 companies are looking at approximately $21 million dollars of potential renewal, refresh or warranty extensions opportunity [multi-manufacturer],” Robinson said.
IBM resellers have used the portal to bring renewals up to 55 percent, said Ravindra “Ravi” Marwaha, IBM’s general manager of Global Business Partners. He would like to see the number hit 80, he said.
Hewlett-Packard resellers have increased product registrations to 90 percent from 60 percent, said Shane Skaff, vice president of business development at MaintenanceNet. “You can’t renew it, if you don’t know it exists,” he said. HP renewals are up about 32 percent, he added.