Lenovo’s New Portal Personalizes Partner Experience With Role-Relevant Materials, Information

Lenovo has launched a new partner portal that provides a single access point to tools, resources and intelligent, personalized information that are most relevant to the partner’s needs, geographic markets and past history.

The Lenovo Partner Hub, part of a company-wide multi-year digital transformation program for business partners, reaffirms the company’s commitment to fostering greater collaboration between business channel partners and Lenovo sales teams across business groups. Powered by advanced analytics, the integrated portal will serve as a one-stop shop designed to better enable channel partners to grow their business at significantly greater speed and consistency.

Already in development before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new portal was created to build stronger relationships with Lenovo’s partners. “We think that a key differentiator that Lenovo can bring to our partners is the manner in which we engage with them,” said Jeff Taylor, Executive Director, North America Channel Strategy & Operations. “You want a personal experience with anybody that you’re talking to you, whether you’re talking to them live or virtually through a portal or through some other mechanism. The more personal you can make that, the more deeply rooted the relationship becomes.”

The personalized portal allows partners to see the materials and information relevant to their business per specialized roles, including a personalized Sales Performance Dashboard. This dashboard provides a snapshot of sales performance and KPI tracking for improved visibility and efficiency. In addition, the portal provides personalized sales summaries that allow deals to be closed faster and more efficiently.

“If you’re a salesperson working at one of our partners, the experience that you should get through our portal is very different than if you’re in a marketing role, or if you’re in a vendor management role. Our goal was to personalize that experience, to foster that interactivity, that engagement, and then ultimately just build tighter and stronger relationships.”

The new portal also provides easier access to a variety of partner tools, said Taylor. Designed for partners across both Lenovo Intelligent Devices Group’s PCs & Smart Devices (PCSD) and the Data Center Group (DCG), the portal provides a unified, consistent experience, bringing together:

• Intelligent pricing: streamlined and integrated pricing engine with Deal Registration and New Customer Bonus/Acquisition Bonus – all in one place
• Digital co-selling: digital marketing assets, partner-ready services, specialist programs and rewards
• Digital processes: realizing efficiencies and speed of execution from opportunity, quotation, order and rewards

The Lenovo Bid Platform is another feature of the Partner Hub. It serves as a pricing engine for partners supporting both PCSD and DCG. Overall, the Lenovo Partner Hub provides easy access to leads, product catalogues, deal registration, deal protection and new customer bonus and discount codes.

Lenovo is committed to improving the partner experience, elevating productivity and speeding up sales to accelerate revenue growth and profitability, by supporting:

• Instant price for small and medium-sized businesses and midmarket deals;
• Accelerated turnaround of Deal Registration and New Customer Bonus/Acquisition Bonus requests;
• Faster turnaround on rebate payments; and
• Dramatic reduction in claim turnaround and increase in claim automation.

“One of our mindsets is to use speed as a differentiator,” said Taylor. “You can always improve on speed. You can always be faster. You can always be easier.” Bringing Lenovo’s partner-enabling tools into a single portal experience was “just improving upon an existing strength of ours. So speed to content, speed to price, speed to protection, are all of those things we’re constantly striving to do better. What this new platform does is give us the infrastructure to stretch the limits of that notion of speed and ease of access.”

Partner engagement with the portal, which was launched initially in select geographical markets, has exceeded expectations, said Taylor. “After one week, 5,500 individuals have registered on the portal. Our goal for the first 30 days was 6,000.”

The fact that the individual registrants represent roughly 1,000 different partner companies points to the value of supporting persona-based experiences, said Taylor. “When you break the total population of registrants into persona types, you really start to understand who’s getting the most value through the tool itself. What we’re seeing is a lot of diversity in roles within the partners. We’re seeing marketing people, we’re seeing salespeople, we’re seeing the vendor management team, et cetera. That’s an early measurement of success of what we’ve been trying to do.”