ZEBRA
what hardware, software, and services fix it, but I’m going to hold you, the channel partner, accountable for fixing it.’ The fix being the outcome that it generates, which is typically the ROI, the saving, the cost removal or profitability or revenue enhancement. Our partners must evolve to be more proactive and outcome-based, which brings a lot more complexity and challenges for them, but ones that Zebra can help with.” Maintaining growth Evolution is critical to the success of PartnerConnect too. Greg adds that Zebra is the market leader, with the most channel partners, but he is careful to note that the company does not take this for granted and works hard to maintain – and further grow – that position. Part of this evolution involves taking in stakeholder feedback. “We did this at the beginning of the year,” says Greg. “I interviewed several of our key internal stakeholders from CEO down, and I selected a group of north of 20 partners and disties externally and asked them what’s working and not working and how can we improve. I recorded those conversations so I could pull out areas where we need to continually evolve. That feedback was golden for me, so we can now make some tweaks in Europe and feedback to the global PartnerConnect organisation to evolve the entire programme.” Close relationships and regular feedback are key for Zebra, and something Greg is keen to develop further in his role, which he was brought into last year when Tim Stoddrd, GM of Zebra in Europe, made some structural changes to put more focus on the channel organisation and asked him to run a consolidated channel organisation across EMEA. Historically, Zebra’s channel operation has been led by regional sales managers, who dealt with channel partners from small to very large. “It was a lot to do, and
it was imperative that we had enough focus on the respective go-to-markets, whether that is end user sales, channel sales or distribution sales,” explains Greg. “One of the objectives of making the change was to put the focus on the channel organisation and the distribution organisation, which is incredibly important. Globally, north of 80% of our revenue goes by the channel, and that’s true for EMEA too. Out of that channel number, more than 90% is delivered by distribution. “It’s imperative that we focus on the disties and the channel. We’re only five and a half months into this journey, but I’m seeing the benefit of giving the channel a voice at the top table and putting a spotlight on channel organisations to make sure that it’s managed appropriately with channel expertise.” AI role For disties and the channel alike AI plays an increasing role, and Zebra is ready for this. Indeed, a recent report by the Wall Street Journal listed the top 10 technology organisations that are ready for the emergence of AI and Zebra was number 10 on the list. “This was an unbelievably proud moment,” says Greg. “I see AI has multiple benefits. “We’ve also recently launched Partner Assistant, an AI tool that all our registered partners have access to and gives them at their fingertips access to everything from service details to product comparisons, and it’s constantly learning, as you would expect. We’re starting to get a lot of adoption of that tool and repeat users of it. “Outside of that, we’ve built a go-to- market strategy around AI tools which we’ve offered to our partner community and our ISVs, which enables them to build on-device AI applications using our enablers, onboard feeds from our AI platform into their own platform, which we're starting to see a lot of pick-up of. “We’re also starting to build out various blueprints, which are chargeable assets,
“
We've recently launched Partner Assistant, an AI tool that all our registered partners have access to and gives them at their fingertips access
to everything from service
details to product comparisons, and it's constantly learning...
”
CONTINUED
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