In May of this year, Harrisburg, Pa.-based D&H Distributing Co. launched a Pre-Sales Support program that connects VARs and MSPs with a solutions expert for personalized assistance with, say, quote creation, assembling a bill of materials, training, configuration of a multiproduct solution, and post-sales support.
Now D&H has made additional investments in people, systems, and process, as well as in pre-sales resources that will help VARs “anywhere from level-one to level-four support, 100 percent managed within the U.S. in our Harrisburg, Pa., facility, and free to all our customers,” says Peter DiMarco, D&H’s vice president of VAR sales. The idea, says DiMarco, is to help the distributor’s VAR and MSP customers move upmarket.
D&H has had pre-sales support for about five years with its top-tier vendors, and has taken the success “with the Ciscos and HPs of the world” and broadened its offering to provide overall pre-sales support, giving VARs just the kind of support they need, when and how they need it, to solve immediate problems, and then work with them on a continual basis. In total, D&H has invested in “20-plus people over the last 18 months,” according to DiMarco.
Through these pre-sales support engagements, D&H hopes to expose more resellers to the benefits of cloud-based infrastructures, where additional resources are available. “The centerpiece of our offering is Office 365,” says DiMarco. “Surrounding that we’ll have a number of support resources, be it pre-sales support, migration resources and tools, and traditional help desk or post-sales support level one though level three for Office 365.”
D&H also has a number of resources for MSPs who want to go deeper into the cloud, and primary among them is a concierge service that enables MSPs to ask whatever questions they have, including “How do I move from an on-premises solution to a cloud solution?” or “How do I go to market with cloud?” or even “How do I close an Office 365 deal?”
Says DiMarco: “So we have concierge, high-touch resources, education and enablement, and a set of tools … [that] you’ll hear about over the next couple of months focused on automated billing, automated provisioning, providing a catalog out to the marketplace, and most importantly, providing that management console for MSPs to go and see all of their offerings, all of their customers, and all [of] their ongoing billings as well.”
For more information on the pre-sales program, call 888-325-1246; to speak with a sales rep, call 800-340-1001.
