Jabra focuses on driving Growth, Innovation, and mutual Success for its Partners

Peter Jayaseelan
VP South Asia & Channels (APAC)
Jabra

Jabra has been one organization which has always placed great emphasis on innovation. The brand ensures to go to the customers first and study the market to understand the workplace trends every six months.  At the same time, Jabra realizes that it is very important to equip partners with knowledge and tools for them to go and interact with the customers.

Jabra has been in India and the rest of the South Asian market for the last 25 years; essentially the company initially catered to the needs of the contact center, when it was a booming industry in India. What this industry required was essentially very good audio devices which could provide crystal clear voice to their customers and also comfort to their agents.

During this time, there was a big move towards Unified Communication as a lot of industries, especially the IT industry started embracing it. So that's when we started working with a lot of these partners who provide IT equipment and supporting services to these multinational and software companies, besides the non IT sector and small and medium businesses. 

A GROWING CHANNEL BASE

Globally, Jabra has always been 100% indirect and would always work along with its partners. We work with a range of partners, for instance the AV system integrators who deal with complex installations. Additionally, we also work with a good number of IT resellers who are happy to do these installations for small and medium size rooms. So we work with different tiers of partners and interestingly, our channel base is growing.

Until three or four years back, we used to be just AV focused. Now we are also doing video. And along with that our partner profile is also changing. The IT resellers who were selling only laptops now sell and install video solutions too. We are also reaching out to Tier 2 and 3 city partners. It starts from 100 very concentrated partners and the number goes up to thousands, with whom we engage in different ways. 

PARTNER ENGAGEMENT & ENABLEMENT

As a channel oriented brand, one of the things that we believe is in the education of our partners. We sell top-end cutting-edge technologies.  And so it is important for our partners to know that so that they can evangelize our customers to buy our products.  As Jabra started signing up and expanding its partner base, Jabra realized that it was very important to equip them with knowledge and tools for them to go and interact with the customers.

So we believe in ECE. Essentially the first E stands for Enablement.  So we make sure that our partners are enabled and we do direct, face to face training, while also online training.  We also make sure that we run a marketing engine and campaigns from time to time that helps our partners in generating important marketing leads.
The second is C, which is about Conversion.  So it's about the ability for the partner to engage and convert a particular lead. That is why, whenever required we do direct dealing with our customers. This I feel helps in faster conversion.

And of course the last E is about Earning. It is about making sure that when partners work with Jabra, we ensure that it makes it worthwhile, whether it is the ability to earn revenue or margin.