HP Inc. has announced a sales accelerator program that rewards resellers for acting on increased demand for displays and accessories.
Beginning tomorrow, U.S.-based Gold and Platinum PC partners in HP’s Partner First program will receive double the financial benefits and incentives paid previously for sales of monitors, docking stations, mice, keyboards, and other peripherals.
The new compensation scheme applies to all of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based manufacturer’s commercial and workstation displays, as well as all of its accessories for commercial desktops, commercial notebooks, workstations, and detachables.
“We’re seeing that that there’s growth opportunity within the market and also within our portfolio around our D&A products,” notes Gary Simms, HP’s head of channel programs and enablement for the Americas, in reference to the displays and accessories space. Indeed, collective sales in the display segment for HP, Dell, Lenovo, ViewSonic, and Acer are currently up 21 percent on an annualized basis, according to recent data from IDC. HP expects that growth to accelerate this year.
The increasing popularity of multi-display workspaces is a key contributor to that growth, according to Simms, along with the rising number of employees who split their time across home and office settings and need matching sets of monitors and peripherals in both places. “The mobile user is really kind of pushing the trend of having more displays and accessories within their work environment,” he says.
Grabbing the attention of resellers prone to neglecting D&A add-ons when selling PCs is another objective for the new commission plan. “Their focus can just be around the actual unit itself, because that’s maybe the larger ticket item from a revenue perspective,” Simms observes. Partners who omit displays and accessories from hardware deals are leaving money on the table though, he notes.
HP’s higher payouts are also designed to incentivize partners familiar with the revenue opportunity around D&A to sell HP products versus offerings from Dell, ViewSonic, Logitech, and other vendors. “It’s even more reason now when they’re selling in HP desktop and HP notebook and HP workstation that they’re attaching the HP products with it versus somebody else’s,” Simms says.
All gold- and platinum-level PC partners in the Partner First channel program will be automatically enrolled in the new benefit program effective tomorrow. There is no end date for the offer. “We’re anticipating that that it’ll be and continue to be core to the Partner First program and the compensation that we have,” Simms says.
Adding program benefits to Partner First in February is unusual for HP, which typically rolls out enhancements in November and May only. According to Simms, however, the D&A market is too big a potential source of incremental revenue right now to justify delays.
“We definitely wanted to try to roll in an off-cycle [addition] and make sure that we got the focus and put the financial incentives out there for the partner, so they could really capitalize on the opportunity right now versus waiting,” he says.
