CASE STUDY

Fortifying with partner experience

Using digital and intelligent automation, Lenovo elevated its partner experience for better loyalty and win rate

Call for Change
When Tech Meets Human Ingenuity
A Valuable Difference
Meet the Team

Call for change

In the enterprise computing market, the dominant channel of distribution for manufacturers comes through indirect business channels. Lenovo got over 80% of its revenue through its partners, but they noted the company’s challenges when compared to its competitors in “ease of doing business” and digital capabilities.

Lenovo’s 80,000 partners ranged from very large to small distributors and local resellers. On the back of multiple mergers, Lenovo’s partner operations were run region wise. This resulted in fragmented systems that made it slower than competitors to quote prices and verify claims and led to lower service attachment rates.

Lenovo needed to reimagine its partner experience so that doing business with it was simple, predictable and profitable.

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When tech meets human ingenuity

Lenovo collaborated with Accenture to undertake a partner experience transformation enabled by digital capabilities & intelligent automation. With the overriding concern of easing partner friction, the program was structured around three key tasks:

Creating a unified, end-to-end global portal.
Enhancing various aspects of the partner program including boosting service attachment rates.
Creating a new “Price to Win” pricing strategy that relied on automation to speed up the quote process.

Personalizing to ring in the X factor

The new portal delivers content based on the user’s needs. Service attachment rate saw investment in new incentives. Price to Win empowered Lenovo’s salespeople to make better decisions on the discounts they offered to buyers.

A valuable difference

Early results of the transformation program show a positive impact with external partners—and internally.

The new portal provides partners a one-stop shop for all needs to efficiently grow their business and even combine hardware and service offerings. Measures of quality for partner experience are expected to vastly improve. Quote turnaround time is expected to shrink from days to minutes for more than 90% of partner transaction bids. The new intelligent pricing strategy, Price to Win, helps identify optimal price points for transactional deals and improves win rates.

The cross-functional team is able to execute and respond more quickly, and the new partner experience has tightened communication between the Lenovo field team and partners, which helps contribute to loyalty and continuing business.