During a year in which the office equipment industry and the business world at large were tackling the challenges of creating value and sustaining revenue under less-than-ideal conditions, HP spent a great deal of time, energy and resources focusing on the future.
The Palo Alto, California-based manufacturer certainly mobilized to mitigate the obstacles created by the pandemic, but maintained focus courtesy of a bold new partner program announced last year and rolled out in November. Named Amplify, it has several elements the OEM believes elevates the initiative from the rest of the pack.
It’s interesting to note that revenue performance—while always a staple of partner programs—isn’t the cornerstone of Amplify. HP wants to help resellers address the evolving customer buying journey through new capabilities while keeping an eye toward desired outcomes—all wrapped around utilizing data and making it easier to do business with HP.
The OEM took its program one step further with Amplify Impact, a sustainable practices bolt-on that digs deep beyond the quest for carbon reduction to stress diversity, equity and inclusion, and to ensure best practices are being applied across its supplier, partner and customer chain. The movement, from a business standpoint, is being driven at the enterprise level, but the core fundamentals are increasingly resonating with SMBs who want to know that their partners have not only embraced the awareness, but are taking actual steps to demonstrate their commitment.
We spoke with HP’s Mary Beth Walker, head of go-to-market channel strategy, and Ellen Jackowski, chief sustainability and social impact officer, to learn more about the short- and long-term goals behind these endeavors.
Can you provide an overview of HP’s business performance in 2020, along with the key variables that drove the results?
Jackowski: Every year in June, we publish a sustainable impact report, which is intentional and extremely transparent and comprehensive. One of the key figures we’re tracking in terms of new sales is that due in part to our actions on sustainable impact, we eclipsed a billion dollars in new sales—total contract value—for the second straight year. These are new customers at the enterprise level who are coming to us with specific requirements, questions and queries around our sustainability actions. We think that number is low, because we’re only tracking it for enterprise RPs, and every year we continue to increase the rigor with which we track that information. It’s a clear indicator that customers care about sustainability more than ever in this space. They’re looking closely at our actions and want to see more from companies such as HP. That’s good news to us, because we’re making all of these changes in terms of how we produce our product, the materials we select, the suppliers we work with to create them and how we distribute them through our partner channel to our end-user customers.
What were some of the highlights in 2020 for HP, particularly in the dealer channel?
Walker: In addition to some of the unanticipated challenges around COVID, we’d been tracking how customers are dramatically changing how they research and buy technology, along with how they engage brands. At the same time, technology and digital transformation are advancing at an astounding pace. We heeded our partners’ suggestions around being easier to do business with and looking at how we go to market together. When we put all those things together, it was felt that we really needed to look at a fresh program. That was the genesis of the Amplify program, which we released Nov. 1. It was truly HP’s cornerstone highlight of 2020. We spent about six months introducing it to partners, ensuring they know what it’s about, along with the elements we were trying to change. The new program helps us make bold moves and take decisive actions to capitalize on customer buying shifts. It also ensures that we’re working with partners to develop the capabilities we think are necessary to be successful with those changes.
Tell us a little about HP’s strategic approach during the pandemic from a product and service perspective and how it pivoted to meet the needs of its resellers and end-users.
Walker: We started to see, as early as March and April, the long-term impact of the pandemic on our team and our channel community, and immediately looked at how we were going to help. First and foremost, we provide a variety of financing and leasing options and expanded those to make sure they included deferred or reduced payments until 2021. We also offered short-term rentals and cash infusions for customer-owned HP devices through a sales/leaseback program, and looked at short-term market and country-specific incentives for various partners based on local conditions. A more predictable, flat-rate incentive program allowed us to relax the compensation models. That provided more flexibility in the linearity from partners while extending deadlines for anything that they needed to provide proof of to us. We relaxed how long they had to do that, understanding they didn’t have people in the offices to be able to process paperwork.
How has the rollout of the Amplify partner program been received, and what are some of the major pain points it addresses as a facilitator of doing business with HP?
Walker: There were a few goals around what we wanted Amplify to help us to accomplish. The first revolved around the ease of doing business with HP. Simplification needed to be one of the design principles of the new program, addressing some of the concerns our partners had noted previously. It was also important that the program not merely focus on performance, but also incorporate partner capabilities needed to be successful and facilitate meeting that customer journey and how they want to buy. The program has two different tracks, Synergy and Power, which basically moved away from the hierarchical structure we had before. Placing value on things beyond performance and focusing on capabilities, data sharing and collaboration was the direction we wanted to take.
We had about 99% revenue coverage with the partners that registered for the new program and 98% of the Power partners, the latter being the ones who we require to provide us data about their business. We’ve spent the first few months of this year starting to work through the process of getting the partners onboarded. We’re communicating what data partners need to share with us, the frequency and how it works. We’re hoping to finish that by May or June of this year.
What sets Amplify apart from other OEM partner programs?
Walker: We feel this is the first program structure that’s optimized to streamline partner engagement and have clearly defined measurement criteria other than just revenue performance. That was vital considering the amount of our business being done through partners. We feel the collaboration component is extremely important for HP to be able to understand what’s happening in the customer journey. We’re the first in our industry to ask partners to share data; it’s a new concept to them. We think it’s the way business is going—all of the cloud-born partners and software companies are well on their way there based on how they operate. Asking for customer data is a pretty big move from where we’ve been with our more traditional and transactional partners. Ultimately, that’s going to allow us to be able to make sure we’re addressing customer needs, with the end desire, our North Star, being that we want to create industry-leading customer outcomes. We didn’t think it would be possible without being able to add the pillars around capabilities and data sharing/collaboration with the partners.
The recently announced Amplify Impact program focuses on sustainability in three core areas: planet, people and community. Carbon reduction is quantifiable; what are the measuring sticks for success with people and community?
Jackowski: Mary Beth and her team have really driven implementation of the Amplify Impact program, and that’s a testament to how sustainable impact and HP’s strategy are cascading and scaling across the entire value chain. Sustainable impact is not just about how we’re creating sustainability inside our own operations, but how it’s applied across our value chain with our suppliers, partners and customers. What the Amplify Impact program really is about is scaling that sustainable impact strategy. There are three pillars of the strategy—planet, people and communities. Planet is focused on driving a low-carbon, circular economy. The people pillar of the strategy emphasizes diversity, equity and inclusion across everything we do, as well as advancing human rights across our value chain. The community pillar is all about unlocking the power of technology, specifically in education, a key vertical we service within our portfolio. It’s about advancing digital equity across all the communities we serve, as well as considering the impact on health care and economic opportunities. Amplify Impact takes that strategy and leverages the full power of the channel. Our goal is to take our sustainability strategy and scale it.
What are the long-term goals for Amplify Impact?
Walker: The objective is to extend our capabilities and leadership in this area to help partners advance their sustainable impact efforts. Including partners gives us exponential reach and the ability to do more than just what we’re doing within our company and directly with customers through HP products. We see sustainability and sustainable impact being core capabilities that partners must build as well. Otherwise, end-users will choose different sources for their business. In the short term, we want to start a community in which partner companies can leverage the competencies we’ve already invested in. That’s important, as we have smaller partners without the ability to invest in the training and programs/initiatives HP has amassed. Providing those elements HP has invested in can give those partners a leg up in their own initiatives.
From a long-term perspective, we’re setting a goal to have at least 50% of partners sign up by 2025. Over time, we’ll be able to track how their efforts are leading to more business as well. When Ellen spoke of over a billion dollars’ worth of opportunities tracked during the last two years, those were just opportunities through our direct sales force. By extending that tracking within our partner community, we’ll be able to show there’s a much bigger pool of business and measure how much of it we’re able to influence through our sustainability efforts we’re leveraging with partners.
Talk about the partner assessment and how partners are going to work with HP to set those goals.
Walker: There are two ways partners can participate right now. The main track, Catalyst, is where we’re creating community. The partner will perform a self-assessment, developed in tandem with a world-renowned sustainability company, which helps us look at their current sustainability efforts and how they compare to their peers. That enables HP to make pointed recommendations on what partners can consider undertaking to advance their efforts. Some of the recommendations are more immediate, others are longer term. From our standpoint, we learn where partners need our help the most. That helps HP ensure its future investments, as we go into 2022 and 2023, are being concentrated on the areas that will provide the greatest impact.
The other track, Changemaker, is an initiative currently being rolled out to six countries. This is specifically for companies that want to get started but don’t currently have sustainability efforts. We can work with them through the next year to help create a sustainability plan with measurements and initiatives—a blueprint that they can share with customers, their shareholders and employees as they move forward.
Jackowski: Some of the programs we’re making available are among the most successful initiatives we’ve rolled out within our existing sustainable impact strategy, such as our planet partner takeback and recycling program. Another example for the community pillar is HP LIFE, a free online educational offering for adult learners and entrepreneurs from the HP Foundation. We have 30-plus courses available in seven languages, focused on entrepreneurship skills. During the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the popularity of those courses. That programming is going to be made available to the Amplify Impact partner community as well. We’re doing our best to take our most successful programs, expand them and make them available to the channel partners so they can just jump in as soon as possible and start creating their own impact.
What are HP’s plans for 2021 in terms of technology development and facilitating success for the dealer reseller community?
Walker: We’ll continue to introduce technology innovations across print and PC this year. In February, we introduced a range of new latex large-format print solutions meant to help print services providers diversify their offerings and meet more challenging customer needs. We’ve addressed the large-format industry with two new products, the HP Latex 700 and 800 series, which offer a suite of features that enable PSPs to be more agile, tackle ambitious projects and take on higher sale work. We think the new portfolio will deliver fast workflows that help businesses hit deadlines while sharpening their sustainability edge.
On the PC side, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, we announced a new HP Dragonfly G2 and Dragonfly Max, with next-level collaboration and an improved work-from-home experience for end-users. There are additional PC updates in the HP Elite Folio and 840 G8 Arrow, giving people freedom to move and meet the demands of a lot of things that they’ve encountered working across home and work—phone, tablet, PC, all the multitasking, multiple monitors and accessories. We think the Elite Book and Elite Folio changes will help us in those areas as well.
Lastly, at CES we announced HP Business Boost, which offers unique support for SMBs, to help them manage remote workers to be more productive with a simple solution for out-of-the box PCs and printers. I think SMB customers, in particular, were not as equipped as bigger customers when they needed to get employees productive in a remote setting, so we hope that HP Business Boost will bolster their efforts moving forward.
