HP has unveiled a retooled worldwide partner program that seeks to accommodate the demands of a new generation of customers while providing greater simplicity, consistency, and transparency to members.
When it officially goes into effect (everywhere except China) for commercial partners on November 1st, the HP Amplify program will replace the current Partner First program with a globally uniform requirements and benefits model designed to reward resellers, MSPs, and solution providers for helping HP forge strategic customer relationships and embrace today’s online-first buying journey.
“I think over are the days where you can be in the top tier of a vendor like HP if you are very much a transactional partner only,” says HP Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell. “You need to be able to understand what an outcome-based business model is. You need to be able to offer value to that customer.”
Retail partners will become part of Amplify as well in the second half of 2021.
Amplify aims to make working with HP easier for channel pros by retiring today’s multitude of geographic and business unit-specific partner programs in favor of a single global organization built around two tracks. The entry-level Synergy track will let partners who clear relatively simple sales and certification thresholds tap into a standardized set of benefits and resources.
“Synergy is where the partners come and tell us, ‘we want to work with you,'” says Luciana Broggi, HP’s global head of route-to-market.
The more demanding Power track will provide richer benefits, greater sales and technical resources, and enhanced marketing support to partners who invest more heavily in three core areas: performance, capabilities, and collaboration. Amplify members who qualify for Power Services status get the same rewards but can also participate in HP’s device as a service, managed print, and other service offerings.
Performance criteria in the new program go beyond raw sales targets to encompass metrics like average sale value and account retention rate. Capabilities tracked by the program evaluate a partner’s service delivery and e-commerce know-how, as well as their “digital skills” in areas like automated quoting and ordering.
Collaboration measurements assess a partner’s willingness to share data about customer buying patterns and business challenges with HP. Combining that information with HP’s deep pool of product usage data and machine learning technology, the company believes, will arm it to build better solutions more closely aligned with ever-evolving customer needs.
“The data needs to inform the end-to-end journey any customer takes with us,” Schell says.
The changing, increasingly digital nature of that journey is central to Amplify’s design, which recognizes that a younger generation of end users increasingly researches, purchases, and implements solutions online.
“Millennials are really now in decision-making positions within our commercial customers, and that just changes the entire engagement,” Schell says, noting that the rapid shift to remote work in response to the coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated the business world’s evolution toward a cloud-first mentality.
In conjunction with Amplify’s launch, HP is also introducing an extension of that program called HP Amplify Impact that allows partners to voluntarily join the company’s commitment to environmental sustainability, human rights, cultural diversity, and economic opportunity. Participants will receive training and support toward realizing those goals.
HP plans to spend the weeks between now and November 1st educating partners about Amplify and helping them decide whether to enter the program as Synergy or Power members. In support of that process, Broggi says, the company has created a “tool that our partner account managers will have the opportunity to use with the partners one by one to show them how much compensation they’re getting today, how much compensation they’re going to get in the future, [and] what they need to do in order to have the same or better compensation going forward.”
Partners will also be asked to participate in a capabilities self-assessment, sign a data sharing commitment, and confirm the profile information about them in HP’s partner database.
Schell stepped into his current position, which is a new one for HP, at the start of the vendor’s current fiscal year last November. He now presides over a restructured global sales team split into 10 markets, instead of three global regions like before. Schell told ChannelPro that a similarly restructured partner program would debut this year during a January interview on the ChannelPro Weekly podcast.
