Mitel emphasises consultancy and vertical expertise

A few weeks on since Mitel unveiled plans to roll out a single global partner programme, its channel is preparing for the launch in April.

The comms player picked up Unify in October 2023 and has been operating twin partner programmes while it formulated a scheme to bring them together.

Stuart Aldridge, head of UK, Ireland and South Africa at Mitel, said that the time was right to introduce a programme that would make life easier for partners working across its entire portfolio.

“It’s been one Mitel for some considerable time,” he said. “In that time, we’ve been working with almost a heritage Unify partner programme and a heritage Mitel partner programme – so, two different programmes, two different sets of operational tools, certainly within Mitel, one sales team, one service one, one operational team. The ambition was always there to build a single programme that gave one partner experience, regardless of the heritage relationships or of the portfolio that you sell.

“We could have rushed something in very early on and came up with something early 2024, that just glued together the look and feel of [what already exists], but we’ve built something based on good partner feedback and customer feedback – something we think customers want to see more from their partners,” he added.

From April, a single global programme will be available with support built around encouraging the delivery of Mitel’s strategic objectives.

“We want to align reward our partners based on our strategy and the partner investment,” said Aldridge. “We clearly, like every other vendor, incentivise based on performance and business momentum, but we’re also targeting partner differentiation. We really want partners to stand out from the crowd, and that’s to inject some new ways to work, promote and motivate new ways to work with their end users, their customers.”

Aldridge added that Mitel is encouraging its partners to move beyond the transaction relationships of simply selling licenses so they can instead deliver long-term valued relationships.

“We’ve got rewards and incentives in the programme that really highlight and promote strong retention and highlight the need for layering on top,” he said. “Customers don’t want to rip and replace, they want long-term value, and they would prefer to see innovation layered on top of what they have.

“We still want growth in terms of Mitel, but we want that through innovation frontline tools, and we’re truly putting in place some better enablement programmes for the partners,” he added.

The enablement tools and emphasis on making partner more competitive includes a focus on encouraging a consultative approach to customers to support Mitel’s vertical market push.

“[The consultative approach is] one thing that we are introducing to the vertical specialisms. I’m a massive advocate of it and I push my teams incredibly hard to be vertical experts. It means I have health care expertise, government expertise, defence expertise, transport expertise – which all helps the partners,” he added. “Over the next 12 months, if you’re a partner who focuses on those verticals that you’re very strong at, and you build your portfolio around those verticals, that will be the answer to success for channel partners going forward.”