‘Limit the type of services that you provide so that you are not competing with your partners on development and implementation services and confusing the customer.
Make sure that the services you provide are differentiated, compliment the services offered by your partners, and are priced at a premium.
Help your partners develop technical competency that enable them to deploy your solution successfully and increase their services revenues.’

You also want to remember or be sensitive to whose VAR’s account you are calling, as if the manufacturer or another one of their favored partners begins soliciting the enduser for products and/or services, and represent themselves like: “I am your new contact for your ABC software, and I would like to quote you on your next upgrade.”

You just shot yourself in the foot. Why? Because the VAR just got a call from the IT director, with the IT director asking the VAR: ‘Is ABC software going out of business as they just contacted me directly or one of their large partners called me claiming to be my new contact for ABC software.’

I always reply: ‘Well, I know it looks like they’re going out of business, but I don’t think they are. Oh, and by the way, I was at a show last week where company XYZ released a new product that competes with ABC product and it is a better solution and one we should consider.’

This is a realworld example, only the names were changed to protect the innocent. Just because they are big, doen’t mean they can take your business. Also as another precaution, I then advise the customer: ‘Should I put company ABC in the email block list for your email server? This will stop them from bugging you?’ The customer says: ‘Yeh, why don’t we do that if you are not recommending their product anymore.’