Business communications company Mitel is combining its heritage partner program with recently acquired ShoreTell’s legacy program into one comprehensive system.
Mitel’s new Global Partner Program includes restructured authorized certification levels with new incentives and tiers. The program is designed to be simple, streamlined, and easier for partners to reap immediate benefits. It also aims to be more flexible than previous programs, encourage better performances, and support new business development.
The new program has three tiers that are based on a points system. To get the points, partners will need to drive revenue – both monthly recurring and onsite revenue – which will equate to points. For example, Mitel’s vice president of North America channel sales Mike Conlon says that for every $500 of onsite business sold, that’s equivalent to one point in the program. For every $10 of cloud monthly recurring revenue, that also equivocates to one point.
“Instead of just looking at just pure revenue thresholds at each level, we accounted for both onsite and cloud business and moved to a points-based system,” Conlon tells CDN. “Now we can look at building credit with our partners based on where the industry is taking them and where their customers take them, versus penalizing them by not being able to give them credit for, say, onsite or cloud if that really wasn’t their expertise or specialty. We can actually build some promotions and drivers by having a point-based system versus just pure revenue.”
He adds that a traditional onsite partner driving $5 million a year of onsite business would qualify for Mitel’s platinum tier, and so would a cloud-centric partner driving $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue.
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In comparison, the company’s old program included four tiers with revenue dollars tied to each tier, and “didn’t really evolve with the industry itself,” explains Conlon.
“As we acquired ShoreTel last September [2017], we did a deeper dive during the due diligence process and looked at the program we had, and the one they had in place. There’s had evolved to meet the unified communications (UC) industry and helped partners transition their business from traditional onsite to some form of cloud,” he says. “This new program is dynamic and keeps up with the times.”
The program is region-specific, so to be an authorized Mitel partner in the US, a business will need to accumulate 250 points. The second Gold tier needs at least 2,500 points, while the top tier, Platinum, requires partners to reach 10,000 points.
Canadian tier thresholds have yet to be released, but are coming soon and will be slightly lower than the US numbers, according to Conlon.
“The Canadian partners will definitely be able to enjoy the same benefits as part of the total global program because we definitely want this to be cohesive. We know that each country will have different trigger points based on what the market opportunity would bear within each one of those countries, so we’ll be releasing more specific numbers as we move along,” he continued.
The new framework was based on direct feedback from Mitel partners around the world, and early responses have been positive.
“The market is evolving quickly as customers are increasingly looking for cloud-based solutions, and to their technology providers, to help them digitally transform,” Glen Williams, CEO at Mitel partner Damovo, says in a Mar. 7 press release. “Mitel’s ability to support private, public and hybrid solutions enables us to provide customers a vision for their business transformation and the technology to get from where they are today to where they want to be.”
