Commvault this week added a series of incentives to its channel program designed to increase the profitability of the company’s most loyal channel partners.
New additions to the Commvault Partner Advantage program include richer rebates, a more lucrative and flexible year-end bonus program, access to additional business development funds, and improved deal registration benefits.
The immediate goal is to encourage most of Commvault’s existing partners to more aggressively focus on increasing market share by acquiring new customers on behalf of Commvault, says Carmen Sorice III, vice president of global partner success for Commvault.
“We have a lot of room to grow,” says Sorice.
The best way to achieve that goal is by making it more profitable for existing partners to focus their limited resources on selling products and services they already know versus having them add additional products to their line card that ultimately divert attention away from Commvault, says Sorice.
A typical Commvault MarketBuilder partner now has the potential to earn an average 2.5% payout increase on a year-over-year basis. A typical distribution partner that helps secure new customer business repeat business or multiple transactions over the course of a year can earn an average 1.65% payout increase year-over-year.
Since deciding to focus the company’s sales efforts on indirect channels, Commvault has been restructuring its operations to lead with its channel sales team. As part of that effort, Commvault is retraining its internal sales team to become channel team leaders that drive sales opportunities in collaboration with partners, says Sorice. Program tier progression and simplified quoting have also been introduced to the Commvault program along with simplified access to training, sales enablement and marketing materials, and real-time support.
The challenge Commvault faces is that competition across the data protection space has never been fiercer at a time when more secondary data is being stored in the cloud than ever. Commvault like most providers of data protection systems has been positioning its platforms as essentially gateways through which data protection and management processes involving data residing in a local data center and the cloud can be more easily managed.
The ultimate success of that effort may yet to be seen, but at the very least, Commvault has already proven how costly overly dependent on direct sales truly is.
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