Hey, Ingram Micro partners, have you used Licensing Locator recently?
Better question, perhaps: Have you even heard of Licensing Locator? It’s a self-serve portal, introduced a year and a half ago, that gives resellers on-demand access to detailed customer-specific status information about software licenses from 70 different vendors.
“Within 30 seconds, they can have that information without having to reach out to us, or without emailing us and having to wait for somebody on my licensing desk to get back to them with that information,” says Lynne Thornton, executive director of software and sales operations at Ingram. “It’s a game changer for them.”
So why, some 18 months after its debut, are only an estimated 10 to 20 percent of Ingram partners utilizing the system at present? “We’ve had Webex after Webex. We’ve had press releases,” Thornton says. “We’ve communicated, but they’re not all using it.”
It’s a frustration Thornton shares with other distribution executives, and not just at Ingram. All too often, big-time distis roll out new resources targeted squarely at their partners’ biggest pain points, and then struggle to drive adoption.
In fact, even the unusually informed and engaged members of Ingram’s SMB Alliance community are often unaware of all the services and programs at their disposal, according to Ingram execs who spoke with ChannelPro at last week’s SMB Alliance Unplugged conference in Buffalo, N.Y. Here are six specific resources that Ingram executives wish more resellers knew about and used.
