Ingram Micro beefs up online presence
- 15 September, 2010 15:12
- Comments 2
Ingram Micro aims to increase the number of products available through its TechLink portal for its reseller base.
Ingram volume and consumer business general manager, Hanspeter Eiselt, said he was looking to gradually move the entire vendor portfolio online through TechLink.
“We were only doing it on a small percentage in the past,” Eiselt said.
He wants to lift that figure to 70-80 per cent. "By offering everything online, I can pass on the savings that I get to our customers," he said..
“We have a very efficient online ordering tool with TechLink, customers are using it to a high degree and we're trying to make it more popular.”
Online sales were fuelling growth in the retail sector, Eiselt said.
“As Australia embraces e-commerce more and more, on the distribution side, we have to keep up with that trend,” he said.
Ingram recently realigned its retail business, splitting it into two sales teams after compiling a detailed review on the needs of its partners and their purchasing requirements.
Eiselt said it had also aligned its customer-facing sales teams into four categories including a major accounts sales team that caters for corporate resellers, retail, a unit that focuses on the trading business and four sales teams focusing on the SMB space.
“We service more than 7000 resellers across the country at any one time and 6000 of them are in the SMB category. Due to that we need the focus of dedicated sales teams that serve their customers through TechLink and dedicated telesales teams supported by business development managers that have specific product knowledge,” he said.
When asked about staff retrenchment, Eiselt couldn’t provide details, but said it had been balanced by the hiring of new staff.
The distributor recently brought across Maarten van Hattum from Ingram in New Zealand to head up its key accounts business.
He previously worked for Motorola and Ericsson and had extensive experience within IT, Eiselt said.
In other news, the distributor also ramped up the number of resellers registered to its Virtual Expotech.
Marketing director, Grant Cleary, said Ingram had added 400 new registrations during the past fortnight.
“On any given day we would have between 100-300 visitors that are spending a significant amount of time there,” Cleary said. “The feedback has been positive and we need to create reasons why people need to come back to Virtual Expotech.
“Two things that we’ve been told in the past that people want from these events is channel enablement and training.”
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Comments
Phil
1
If Ingram micro really want to get their resellers to truly embrace their website they need to look at making more of their product available online and at the right price.
Quite often Ingram offer us specials but their can't be ordered on techlink, my belief is that they could, maybe their staff don't know how to do this.
We would happily order everything we need from them if we could do it online if they can get this right...
Reseller
2
Why don't you try Dicker Data? They have that feature.