HP has launched a channel intelligence platform designed to help its partners assess their business performance, anticipate customer needs, and identify new sales and marketing opportunities.
Introduced during HP’s online Reinvent conference today, HP Amplify Data Insights, as the new system is called, follows through on a pledge HP made to its partners when it first announced HP Amplify, an all-new partner program that officially went into effect last November: Provide us your data about customer buying patterns and business challenges and we’ll pool it with our own data to help us both build solutions closely aligned with customer needs.
“With the release of this new platform, we are delivering on Amplify’s collaboration promise by turning HP and its partners’ data into deeper insights that inspire new strategies and steer innovation, readying partners to succeed in the race towards the future of work and beyond,” said Cristoph Schell, HP’s chief commercial officer, in a Reinvent keynote.
HP Amplify Data Insights is available now via the HP Partner Portal to all Amplify members who meet the program’s data quality guidelines. The system currently contains over a billion data points from HP, third-party sources, and HP partners, according to Mary-Beth Walker, HP’s head of global channel strategy.
“It’s a range of data that they have, data that we have, and data that we purchase,” she says, noting that much of that data has never been available to partners before.
“There are some pieces of information that they do already have access to, but most of it is actually new insights that at least HP hasn’t produced for them before,” Walker says. “What we’re going to do with the Amplify Data Insights dashboard is enable partners to have ways to monetize data and supercharge their growth strategies in ways that we haven’t been able to in the past.”
Insights produced by the platform, HP says, fall into three categories. Descriptive insights help partners weigh their performance against peers in areas like sales growth, inventory levels, and salesforce compensation. “The intent is that they can use this information to help them formulate their strategies for their business going forward and where they’re going to get growth from,” Walker says.
Predictive insights, according to HP, help partners anticipate customer needs before they’re expressed through product warranty and renewal “heatmaps,” customer buying forecasts, and other tools.
“The intent of the predictive insights is to provide partners future-looking information about the customers that they’re doing business with today around those customers’ purchase probabilities, the kinds of topics that those customers are interested in, their engagement evolution, and their buying intent,” Walker says.
Prescriptive insights, finally, are designed to help partners drive incremental revenue by spotlighting upsell, cross-sell, and marketing campaign opportunities for individual customers and groups of them. “Here are actions you could take that would help to actually move things with your customers further in a more unique customer-by-customer-specific way,” Walker explains.
Tutorials, handbooks, and other training materials are available online now to help partners interpret and act on data from the new platform effectively. Partner business managers will be reaching out in coming weeks to provide additional guidance.
“They will be kind of the conduit between all of the resources that we make available to the partners and how we actually create individual use cases for that partner themselves and how they might best use it,” Walker says.
How willing channel pros would be to share highly sensitive sales and customer information with an outside vendor was one of the Amplify program’s biggest question marks before launch. According to HP, however, 98% of eligible partners have opted in to report data so far.
Businesses that base their vision and strategy on data are 58% more likely to beat their revenue goals than non-data driven companies, the company says, citing data from Collibra/Forrester Consulting.
Amplify’s innovative design won HP a place on ChannelPro‘s list of 2020 All-Star award winners.
Also at Reinvent today, HP introduced a new managed print program for hybrid workforces.
