Having your cake and eating it too

A while back I left a comment on a post my good friend Michael Farnum wrote about a recent sales call he made along with a vendor partner to a potential customer.  It started a bit of a dialog between Michael and I and some others about what the expectation should be for a VAR or reseller's engineer selling a vendors product.  Today the Georgia peanut gallery weighs in by way of Mike Rothman.

Let me first of all say that I get it.  As a vendor, my expectation that the VAR/reseller's (should there be different expectations between a VAR and reseller?) engineers should be proficient in my products is pie in the sky.  Today's VARs sell too many products and have too much to learn to really know it as well as my own people do.  What I don't buy is that they are not making enough margin on the deals to make it worth their while to learn.  Yes, VARs may fall over themselves and cut their own throats on a Cisco deal and wind up with less than 5% margin, but VARs selling products from smaller companies like StillSecure routinely make 25 to 30% margins on sales.  Granted there is a lot more demand and business from Cisco, but you have to make the decision if low margin-high volume is your game or not.

So if as a vendor I should not have an expectation of the VAR engineer being proficient in my product that he is selling to his customer, what should my expectation be?  Yeah, I know that they all worship at the alter of customer satisfaction and trusted security adviser. But making sales and money is ultimately what they are there for. Let a few bad quarters of sales go by and watch how quick they convert to the god of the almighty buck.

Let me give you an even better example.  Post-sales professional services.  VARs like to claim that they add value by adding services and support. They don't want the vendor to do the post-sale install, as that is high margin work that they would prefer to do themselves.  So, what is my expectation as a vendor there?  Should I not expect that if the VAR is taking it on themselves to install and implement the solution, they should have a level of proficiency in the product to properly do so?  I would think the answer is obvious, but it is not.  In fact with things like NAC, I see lots of VARs that though they want to make the money from pro services, don't have the network expertise and the product specific expertise to do it right.  Before we learned this lesson we had several customers that we had to come in ourselves and rescue because the VARs limited knowledge really screwed the pooch. 

Now, we just tell the VARs that we understand their model. We will do the pro services and implementation ourselves and still give the VARs the margin on it. It actually is more profitable for them to do it that way, then for them to have their own people do it.  Mike Rothman says I am trying to buy their business.  Maybe I am.  But I am also trying to make sure that the customer gets the solution he paid for, working the way it was intended.  Is that such a bad thing?