With businesses from all sectors feeling the credit crunch, business partners are seeing demand drop as companies tighten their purse strings. This can be particularly damaging to business partners with limited solution portfolios and expertise.
In order to continue increasing revenues and fulfilling customers’ needs, partners need to be looking to widen their addressable markets and diversify their product portfolio. This will allow them to target more customers and cater to existing customers’ additional requirements. Furthermore, during this particularly tough economic time, organisations must now more than ever be looking to transform themselves into dynamic enterprises in order to maximise the potential of their existing employees and resources. Partners need to be able to capitalise on this opportunity and offer the technology that enables business transformation.
However, the cost of the training needed for a wider technology portfolio and to adopt a new vendor’s technology is high, and in the current economic conditions this means it is not always a viable option.
The Train & Gain initiative aims to take this burden off business partners by offering a variety of free training packages for existing and new Alcatel-Lucent business partners in the UK and Ireland. The four main training offerings in Train & Gain are aimed to help partners minimise the cost of developing skills around new technologies and maximise their return on investment.
Train & Gain provides training for different groups of partners. Firstly, Alcatel-Lucent is looking to boost channel recruitment in the SMB space to help more partners capitalise on this increasingly lucrative market. To do this, the initiative gives new SMB partners that sign up with Alcatel-Lucent access to free of charge training sessions on pre-sales and post-sales, voice, data and wireless LAN. This will allow more partners to benefit from the high margins SMB sales offer, and equip them with all the knowledge and skills to see through the sales process from start to finish.
For existing Alcatel-Lucent SMB partners there are a range of free entry level training courses in areas such as data and wireless LAN, in order to help drive demand generation and also enable them to better fulfil customers’ additional requirements, consequently increasing customer satisfaction.
In addition, mid-market training and other courses are available for those existing partners who are looking to develop new skills and broaden their expertise in a new market, as well as increasing their ability to up-sell and cross-sell solutions.
Lastly, a number of training courses across the Alcatel-Lucent product portfolio are also available free of charge to Premium Business Partners, allowing them the opportunity improve their technical expertise in a large number of different areas including security, data and unified communications. This can open up new profitable areas, as despite the current economic climate, security issues will always be a high priority for companies. Alcatel-Lucent’s new security portfolio of products, designed specifically to address major security concerns, will provide partners an area of guaranteed growth regardless of the economic conditions.
Train & Gain is significant as Alcatel-Lucent recognises that scaling back investment will only exacerbate the economic situation. By driving technical diversification and increasing target markets, partners can beat the credit crunch and continue to grow.