Conferences are still great places to display your products and services while getting the chance to discuss the benefits of your company’s reseller programs with a large number of VARs and MSPs. The opportunity to meet prospective partners remains a major advantage, but augmenting existing channel relationships and receiving a greater ROI for your sponsorship is just as important. Did you ever have several employees attending an industry conference that didn’t have anything productive to do when attendee sessions were taking place? Seems like a great time for them to attend educational sessions created expressly for IT channel vendors, with topics that can help your team advance their indirect sales, marketing and general business skills.
The CompTIA Breakaway team was listening to your needs. This year’s agenda includes a vendor education track, offering a number of instructional sessions developed specifically for companies that sell through the IT channel. These courses are strictly targeted for vendor executives and related professionals and led by respected training experts from distinguished organizations such as IPED, 4-Profit and Amazon Consulting. Attendees will walk away with solid information and best practices that can be used to grow their business and/or improve their organization’s processes. These education sessions will be conducted during CompTIA Breakaway 2011 in Washington D.C. and each is FREE to all vendor attendees.
The presentations and discussions include:
- IPED Channel Masters @ Breakaway: The Disrupted Channel Eco-system: Staying in Touch with the Driving Forces in IT Channels: Do you have a handle on all the changes happening in the tech industry and IT channel? Join Rauline Ochs, SVP and general manager for IPED/Everything Channel, as she covers the key issues facing the channel ecosystem, including the current economic climate and how technology delivery changes are reshaping your partners’ businesses. Using the results of IPED’s latest survey of the solution provider landscape, she will help channel executives map out their partner enablement, program and resource strategies for the year. The session runs from 10:00 to 11:00 AM on Wednesday, August 3rd.
- IPED Channel Masters @ Breakaway: Key Training Techniques for Channel Sales Reps: They key to success with any channel program comes down to one crucial element; sales team execution. In this session, Mark Williams, a senior consultant with IPED/MarketBridge, will share a framework for building a successful channel field organization through effective training and enablement programs. If you’re interested in transitioning your channel team from "order takers" to indirect sales champions, check out this education session from 11:00 AM-12:00 PM on August 3rd.
- Telecom Providers and Cloud Services: Leaders or Laggards?: Convergence can mean different things to different groups of people, as illustrated by the merging of the telecom and services channels to provide new communications platforms. How do the disparate support and business model needs fit in your partner program? Join Amazon Consulting’s Beth Vanni as she shares important research on this topic and moderates a panel of industry professionals as they discuss the expectations of their national and global telecom/service providers. Panelists include Bob Gault, vice president of worldwide service provider channels for Cisco, and Jim Livingston, SVP of channels and alliances for Terremark. The session will be conducted from 1:45 to 2:45 PM.
- Understanding Your Partner's Business: 97 percent of solution provider businesses have less than 50 employees, which means IT vendors must recruit the most proactive and creative partners to be successful. But how do you build a channel strategy that identifies and attracts those companies? Join Larry Kesslin, president of 4-Profit LLC, to learn how to best deploy your resources by concentrating on the incremental growth of top performers. Does your channel program give those star performers the tools they need to propel your sales and profitability? If not, check out this session from 1:45 to 2:45 PM on Tuesday, August 2nd.
