As technology changes so does the way in which the channel needs to engage and interact with their customers. This requires vendors to take a long hard look at how they work with their partners and resellers, and provide them with the tools they need to not just support clients better – but also chase revenues, improve margins, and succeed in their own business.
Following updates to the Nutanix Elevate partner programme, Tunde Abagun, channel manager for the company in sub-Saharan Africa, unpacks what these changes mean to its channel.
What is Elevate?
The Nutanix Elevate Partner Programme supports and rewards our ecosystem of skilled partners across all specialisations who deliver the utmost in value to their customers.
What makes Elevate different from other partner programmes?
Elevate uses common programme framework that balances competency-based requirements with tangible benefits and enhanced incentives to drive a recurring revenue continuum.
How has Elevate evolved in recent years?
Recently, we re-invented the Elevate Partner Programme to focus on providing a better experience for the entire partner ecosystem and customers throughout the customer lifecycle. It is still staying true to the programme’s unified framework but has been expanded to include additional benefits to drive profits for our partners as well as foster partner independence. Think of it as an evolution based on partner feedback and the maturity of the programme.
Why did Nutanix decide to make the significant change to the programme now?
The IT industry is at an inflection point in how customers want to procure and consume technology. The updates to the programme are designed to address many of our partners’ needs to engage with customers through their lifecycle. With these enhancements, Nutanix wants to better enable its partners to adopt, perform, expand, and ultimately renew customers in ways that are better reflective of today’s digital demands. As such, Elevate now supports and rewards partners along this entire journey through purpose-built benefits and incentives.
How extensive are the changes made to Elevate?
In the past year, our company has re-architected its go-to-market strategy, programmes, and tools to provide partners with more control, insights, and efficiency over their sales cycles. This is why we have introduced several updates to the Elevate programme to reflect this need to equip partners with the means to drive their profitability and strengthen their relationship with customers in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Please provide details on how the incentive framework has been updated.For the first time in the history of the Elevate programme, we have extended incentives to include not only partners, but individual sellers and systems engineers. This is designed to ignite new customer acquisition growth.
The New Business Individual Incentive will reward individual sellers and systems engineers at eligible resellers and services providers each time they sell Nutanix into net-new accounts.
Beyond that, Nutanix will begin to roll out a pilot programme for an Elevate Programme incentive designed to reward select partners for the delivery of consistent, on-time renewal rates with their Nutanix customers.
What about existing partners? How do they benefit?
We have launched a Channel Led Selling Rebate Incentive for Elevate. This has been developed to reward Nutanix resellers who drive deals through the entire sales cycle autonomously. On a macro level, this tackles the burgeoning skills gap in Africa by directly mapping commercial rewards to partner competency, thus increasing the overall time and financial investment (we drive) in training activities across all channel partners on the continent. In essence, as a business we are now enabling partners to enhance their sales cycle through new tool sets. These include the recently revamped Sizer 6.0 capacity planning tool and making enhancements to Nutanix’s Performance + Deal Registration programme.
What are the different partner competency levels in Elevate?
Elevate competency levels are built to reward partners who develop deep sales, technical, and services skill sets to enable successful customer outcomes with the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
- Nutanix Authorised: Authorised to sell Nutanix with foundational sales and technical competencies.
- Nutanix Professional: Have expertise and experience with Nutanix solutions and services.
- Nutanix Champion: Possess the highest level of product, administration, and services competencies with Nutanix.
Will Nutanix continue to focus on building partner competencies?
As a partner-driven organisation, we remain committed to equipping our partners with the best skills, technologies, tools, and platform available to put them in the best possible position to drive sales. We are wholly committed to ensuring our partners build competencies through access to continued education and certification opportunities.
To this end, we have introduced a new Sizing Associate accreditation requirement for all levels. This is designed to enable partners to speed up the sales cycles through rapid capacity planning, quoting and order fulfilment using Nutanix Sizer.
What is your plan around empowering the channel operationally and reduce time to market for their customer?
Nutanix has made the ordering process for our distribution partners a more user-friendly experience. A significant portion of this has been automated with our distributors being empowered to deliver on quotes themselves to speed up the delivery process. Removing their dependence on a Nutanix account manager to sign off on every deal – will significantly speed up the time to quote and the time to the actual delivery of a solution. This also enables us to build a community of partners with the highest level of trust, transparency and responsibility.
All the enhancements made to the programme have been done to not only improve the partner experience, but also provide the customer with a more effective approach to getting Nutanix orders.
Where can partners go to find out more about Elevate?
Ask us! We really are driving a more open door policy with our customers in the region so we want all our partners across Africa to pick up the phone or drop us an email. No partner programme works without us collectively working together.