Lenovo has introduced a new partner portal offering unified access to comprehensive sales, marketing, training, and support resources.
Called the Lenovo Partner Hub and due to open its doors on Monday, the site is the first from the hardware maker to support its client device resellers and data center partners in one place.
“Both the data center group and the intelligent devices group are going to leverage the same platform,” says Steve Biondi, North American channel chief for Lenovo’s Data Center Group. “What that means to our partners that sell both solution sets is one place to go, one ordering vehicle, one deal registration vehicle across the board.”
The hub also offers partners who previously had to search across tools for needed materials what Biondi calls a “one-stop shop” for everything from preparing bids and tracking rebates to downloading marketing materials, executing lead generation campaigns, and taking online training courses.
“They log in once and they have access to everything,” he says.
To ensure that individual users can easily find information relevant to their specific role, the new site lets users choose among “personas” offering customized views for salespeople, marketing professionals, and others, along with personalized KPI dashboards. Craig Goodman, a business development manager distributor Tech Data, expects that functionality to make transacting business with Lenovo simpler.
“At Tech Data, we obviously have many different positions and it’s going to make it easy to where sales can have all of the product information that they need but somebody on the finance side can have reports and stuff that they need,” he says.
According to Lenovo, Partner Hub users will enjoy “instant pricing” on deals involving SMBs and mid-market enterprises.
“They can raise the deal registration for a new customer opportunity and then leverage the Lenovo bid portal to submit a bid opportunity directly to Lenovo and get pricing back directly from Lenovo in the matter of minutes,” says Rob Cato, vice president of North America channel for Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group.
They will also get faster turnaround on deal registrations, bonus requests, rebate payments, and claims. “The integration into our CRM tool is a lot tighter with this new platform than with the previous one,” Biondi says. “We’ll be able to turn that stuff around within days.”
Users can get live assistance from support personnel from within the portal as well. “Configuring data center solutions can be very complex,” Biondi notes. “Having access to live chat and having live support to help accommodate that is just orders of magnitude better.”
The Partner Hub’s launch is a major milestone for Lenovo in a long-running digital transformation process aimed at streamlining online interactions with its partners.
“This is a long time coming,” Cato says. “We’ve spent several years getting ourselves to this point.” The project cost “millions of dollars” as well, he adds.
For data center partners, the new website is the latest benefit of membership in the revised partner program Lenovo rolled out in April. Built around a new tiering structure with differentiated benefits designed to make the rewards of reaching higher levels more attractive, the program has already doubled the number of partners at the high-end platinum level in its first three months.
