Partnering to Win

[La Toya Hodge (Polycom_LaToyaH)]

Mark Arman’s Partnering to Win was the last keynote presentation of the day.  Mark made a bold prediction that 2015 will be transformative year for Polycom and its partner community. “Partners bring Polycom’s strategy to life by integrating broader solutions and developing innovative applications that change work processes and result in compelling vertical solutions.  Overall Polycom vision and strategy coupled with long standing partnerships have laid the foundation for our joint successes to date” said Mark. He also addressed market dynamics and challenges currently taking place in enterprises across the globe. According to Mark, “World class organizations raise the bar before they need to.” He also surmised that world class organizations exhibit four attributes:

• A vision of the future and their role in shaping it
• Commitment to excellence and customer satisfaction
• Collaborative and adaptive culture
• An inherent drive to continuously improve and raise the bar

He acknowledged several well-known companies that excel due to these attributes; he was particularly candid that Polycom’s enablement offerings and current partner program lacked many of these attributes.

As a signal of Polycom’s reinvigorated commitment to the channel Mark presented Polycom’s new Global Polycom Partner Program. The new program provides several lucrative benefits for partners to both invest and grow with Polycom and it is based on four strategic objectives: 

• Simplicity: Over time, Polycom will offer standard  investments, discounts, rebates and other incentives across regions and reseller categories
• Transparency: The program will deliver predictable outcomes based on real-time  data and partner performance metrics
• Accountability: Collective accountability for business plans, commitments and investments.  According to Mark, Polycom will ”say what we are going to do, and then do what we say.”
• Business Velocity: Designed to support fast decision making, accelerate sales cycles and fuel growth

Mark wrapped the presentation by boldly claiming, “Polycom is the only vendor that provides options to sell across ALL modalities, be it hardware, software, or even the cloud. Customer needs and satisfaction are at the forefront of everything taking shape at Polycom. Though the short term impact to partners will require some changes, in the long run Polycom can and will ‘Partner to Win’ with progressive, entrepreneurial, innovative partners around the globe.”