Channel partners play a pivotal role in promoting our products and solutions

How are partners important in expanding your reach?

Channel partners play a pivotal role in promoting our products and solutions to end customers.  In such a highly complex and increasingly challenging business environment it is important to keep changing channel policies and practices that suits to the changing dynamics of your business activities. The success of any organization eventually depends upon the efficiency and range of its go-to-market strategy. Channel partners allow us to deliver products and services in areas where we do not have direct presence; therefore it is imperative to have strong channel partners to accelerate business growth in different parts of the country.

How much do you think about the profitability of partners?

 Profitability of our partners is of paramount importance to us. In this regard we have introduced a new ‘Channel Partner Program’ that offers more flexibility and specialized on key business lines of our solutions that include cooling, secure power, home and business networks, server rooms and datacenter. We are working to make the program easier to use through process and online design portal. Our partner can discover an increased ability to move up through the program levels to access additional benefits. Working with Schneider Electric will lower the business risk with proven quality and results—like saving your customers up to 30% on their energy costs.

Since inception, how has Schneider revamped its marketing/GTM strategy, in India?

Since inception (two decades ago) in India we were unique in setting up model through our key national distributors (Ingram, Redington, Rashi and Iris) focused on key parameters as proximity, visibility and availability. Till 2010 we were product focused, post that we have built a channel partner program to help partners design and deliver solutions based on our offerings.

Specialization is key which we are driver to differentiate this will help channel partners to be competent and ensure they deliver value to customer for building physical infrastructure.  Customers can be sure that they are buying right and qualified partner who are specialized.

Which territories in India you have penetrated through partners and how much did it help you in generating business?

We are present in almost all territories of the country with our product business; however focus is on next 24 cities which are fast growing beyond top 8 cities to be present for our solution business which includes UPS, Precision Cooling solutions and Datacenter/Server rooms.

We currently have identified, certified partners to cater to customer demand in these cities which is helping us in increasing our footprint significantly.

Which training programs are mandatory for Schneider channel partners?

New channel partner program, it is mandatory for the partners to certify on sales as well as pre-sales. We do have partner training which can be accessed through our channel partner portal, followed by the certification.

We also conduct classroom training programs which will help in partners getting certified on design aspects of solutions. We also use technology effectively to reach out with webex and virtual events.

What is the criterion for selecting partners?

We have a structured program for channel partners at various levels which is competency based; we start from partnership levels with plug and play products. We do have specialized channel programs for SOHO/Home Small IT, Cooling, Industry and Infrastructure, Software, IT Power and Datacenter.

We focus on enablement, certification and joint marketing activities with partners in various disciplines and last but not the least we have attractive incentive program to excite our channel partners.