In a recent interview, Meaghan Kelly, Vice President of Channel Strategy and SMB at HP, provided a great perspective about the sheer magnitude of the SMB marketplace and why the channel is the only way to reach it: 

“Globally 95 percent of all private companies have fewer than 500 employees. Well over half of the world’s employed individuals work in the SMB sector.  In the U.S. alone, there are 12.5 million small businesses and most of them don’t have the appropriate IT knowledge, expertise or infrastructure and are looking at trusted advisors to help manage their IT… For HP products in the U.S., SMBs represent a $57 billion opportunity.  We have 20 percent market share and want to get a big slice of the other 80 percent.”

We believe the only way to find these “trusted advisors” to small business—the VARs who truly reach the SMB market—is to understand your channel partners’ actual sales history all the way through to the end-customer.  Instead of relying on what the channel partner says they do, look at what their sales history tells you. Find the partners who have been successful reaching the other 95 percent instead of recruiting the partners who are selling to the same 5 percent that your direct sales team is selling to.  You can only do this by collecting POS data that includes the end-customer data and then processing it to identify every customer that was sold to— not just the clients that are on your strategic account list.

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