Lenovo is aiming to help its partners boost their sales and revenue in specific market segments by offering five new pre-configured “partner journeys” that are designed to make it easier to sell Lenovo’s products and services.
The five Lenovo 360 partner journeys are being offered through the Lenovo 360 Global Partner Framework and are the first of what are expected to be a growing range of similar partner journey frameworks that the company will expand over time.
The first partner journey frameworks to be unveiled are Lenovo 360 for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Lenovo 360 for Global Systems Integrators (GSIs), Lenovo 360 for AI, Lenovo 360 for Data Management, and Lenovo 360 for Education. The programs are designed to make it easier for partners to sell across Lenovo’s portfolio of devices, infrastructure, services, and other offerings.
“This is a smart, strategic move by the team at Lenovo,” Shelly Kramer, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, told ChannelE2E. “Partners are a critical part of getting products and services to market, yet they are often challenged in ways that large tech brands are not. They are navigating this landscape often with smaller, lean teams, a pullback on marketing resources, lack of expertise, and are often challenged by a lack of sales enablement resources.”
Under the partner journeys initiative, Lenovo is trying to make those conditions easier for its partners, which will ultimately also help Lenovo’s sales and revenue, said Kramer.
“Lenovo is clearly focused on putting everything [partners] need to be successful in place, helping drive their success in serving end customers,” she said. “The digital resources, training, communities where they can engage with others on a similar journey, as well as collateral and assets that they can grab and immediately put to use is a tremendously attractive value proposition, and when you add [additional] attractive incentives, it is a win all the way around.”
More Details on Lenovo 360’s Partner Journeys
Included in each of the first five partner journeys from Lenovo 360 will be digital platforms aimed at helping partners with sales enablement and marketing, as well as communications tools through the Lenovo Partner Hub. Training platforms for learning paths, certifications, and accreditations will also be provided, as well as reward programs and financial incentive programs that will offer increasing benefits as partners expand their sales within the Lenovo 360 framework.
Digital platforms such as community forums, advisory boards, and events will also be part of the new partner journeys to bring partners and Lenovo’s experts together for collaboration and sharing of best practices to better serve customers. Ready-to-use marketing materials will also be provided through digital platforms to help partners promote their products and services to their customers, according to Lenovo.
The Lenovo 360 for MSPs partner journey program is available for use immediately in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, UKI, Japan, India, and Australia, while the Lenovo 360 for GSIs, Lenovo 360 for AI, Lenovo 360 for Data Management, and Lenovo 360 for Education programs will be available to partners globally by April 2025 on the Lenovo Partner Hub.
The Lenovo 360 program debuted in 2022.
Partner Journeys Designed to ‘Align With the Partner’s Journey’
Jeff Taylor, the worldwide channel strategy leader at Lenovo, said the new program was started because the company knows that its partner community is not homogeneous and that one size does not fit all when it comes to the channel.
“Our motivation is to flex our Lenovo 360 framework offerings to align with the partner’s journey and not force the partner into our journey as a vendor,” said Taylor. “These five pathways we have announced help the partner find focused products and solutions and the right elements of the framework that best fit their needs around some of these high-growth areas of focus like AI, or for a specific route-to-market like MSPs.”
An Evolutionary Strategy for Lenovo, Says Analyst
Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group, told ChannelE2E that creating these kinds of collated journeys for partners “has been Lenovo’s major goal for a number of years” because they bring a complete product and services picture to partners and their customers. The partner journeys bring synergies between Lenovo’s that are critical, he said.
“Most companies, due to the way their executives and operating units are incentivized, operate in silos, making it difficult for sales, and particularly external partners, to navigate across the company to meet the complex, unique needs of customers,” said Enderle. “This Lenovo effort is designed to overcome that, and it is the most aggressive and effective effort of its type I have seen so far.”
For partners and MSPs, the partner journeys from Lenovo will likely boost their sales of Lenovo products and services, said Enderle.
“It makes it far easier to craft Lenovo-centric complex customer-targeted solutions,” he said. “Working with a company as complex as Lenovo can be exceedingly challenging, but this effort substantially reduces this difficulty and should cause partners to favor Lenovo solutions as the complexity of their customers’ needs grows.”
Other companies have attempted such strategies in the past, said Enderle, with varying levels of success.
“Trying to do this is not unusual – but succeeding is – and Lenovo has made impressive progress so far,” he said. “Only Motorola remains an outlier, and even they are now beginning to play as a greater integrated component into what has become a uniquely integrated cross-company effort at Lenovo.”
