Maximising ROI with PartnerCentral: Strategies for Success
With the shift to B2B digital marketplaces and accelerating demand for as-a-Service solutions and subscriptions, PartnerCentral is making it easier for partners to adapt.
By 2025, Gartner predicts that 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. They also forecast that 60% of sales organisations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales processes, applications, data, and analytics into a single operational practice.
This brings positive changes to the way the channel does business but there are also challenges partners face. B2B buying processes are complex and sales cycles can be long and admin intensive. More “digital natives” are moving into management positions and bringing their influence and online preferences with them. The pandemic has also had a hand in the uptake of digital experiences as we all realised how much more effective digital business methods are. The bottom line is customer engagement and buying behaviour is going digital. It’s inevitable.
Considering this trend and to align to our strategic priority to become a digitally enabled company, we launched PartnerCentral, our partner marketplace in 2023. PartnerCentral marks an important evolution of our digital tools and capabilities. We consolidated our partner-facing tools into one easy-to-use interface and enhanced the features and functionalities to drive superior partner experiences and Partner Success.
What is PartnerCentral, our B2B digital marketplace?
PartnerCentral is our partner marketplace that enables our partners to buy and manage multivendor hardware, software, and services in a single platform. Through this technology marketplace, partners can get instant quotes, place orders online, initiate RMAs, download PODs or invoices, manage subscriptions, and more. Its capabilities extend beyond just the transactional by giving our partners access to data insights and enablement tools that help them grow their businesses and portfolios.
PartnerCentral drives Partner Success
In a digitally focused world, PartnerCentral is helping partners maximise ROI through 5 key business outcomes.
1. Accelerate XaaS transformation
Transitioning to Everything-As-A-Service (XaaS) and subscription models can be complex for partners to manage at scale. PartnerCentral makes delivery of these services to end customers easier by improving the procurement and management of recurring offers. Through insightful data and analytics, partners can manage their subscriptions, grow their recurring revenues, and simplify their cloud procurement. Partners can effectively improve their recurring sales growth with PartnerCentral.
2. Simplify complex multivendor transactions
Partners are facing huge complexity when it comes to buying and selling enterprise solutions. There are a plethora of vendor platforms and systems to navigate to design complex enterprise solutions specific to their end customer needs. PartnerCentral simplifies this by offering a single platform to buy and manage multivendor solutions, regardless of whether it’s a piece of hardware, a software license, subscription, or a combination.
3. Boost productivity through self-service
Partners can save time and reduce manual tasks through automation and self-service capabilities in PartnerCentral. The broad product catalogue in PartnerCentral has advanced filtering to help partners find products, pricing, and stock information fast. Partners can also manage their users independently, track cloud usage and spend, as well as get instant quotes and review their transaction history and data.
4. Grow and optimise revenue with data and insights
Data in recurring revenue models is crucial for success. With PartnerCentral, partners have access to intuitive data and insights, helping them capitalise on industry trends, spot new opportunities in their customer base and manage their renewals proactively. Partner Insights, an app within PartnerCentral, offers descriptive analytics that can help with business optimization and agility.
5. Streamline sales processes with automations and integrations
With PartnerCentral, partners can improve their efficiency and accuracy with vendor automations and integrations. Automated configuring, advanced pricing, quoting and ordering processes, help partners serve their end customers more efficiently. PartnerCentral’s carrier integrations also enable partners to track their orders in real time.
PartnerCentral: A digital gateway
Westcon-Comstor recognises that our partners want to work with us in a hybrid way – they want a combination of self-service digital tools and integrations into our systems, as well as human interaction, enablement, and support. PartnerCentral offers a feature rich B2B digital marketplace embedded with data and insights, and it gives our partners access to our Comstor Partner Portal (exclusive to our Comstor partners) and our Partner Learning platform, making it a must-have partner platform for streamlined transactions, new revenue streams, and enablement resources.
PartnerCentral is part of our transformation which is to be more automated and more digital in our overall approach. Our goal is to continue to drive the same type of value to our partners that we’ve been famous for over the last 35 years. PartnerCentral allows us to do that with a digital experience so the information our partners need is readily available at their fingertips so they can make quick business decisions to grow their businesses.
Explore PartnerCentral today
If you’re an existing Westcon-Comstor partner, you can log in with your Single Sign On (SSO) credentials or sign up if you’re a new partner through our PartnerCentral webpage.
