Citrix unveils channel Elite

The channel must adopt a more strategic sales approach for the desktop virtualisation market.

That’s according to Citrix’s (NASDAQ:CTXS) VP for channels, sales programmes & strategy, EMEA, Carsten Thomsen, who has spelled out its Elite sales programme, designed to help its top performing channel partners grab market share.

Thomsen points to a channel survey released today that says current key drivers for desktop virtualisation have changed dramatically from a year ago. The survey contends uptake in 2010 was driven by faster desktop deployment and migration to Windows 7. Now, says Thomsen, the main driver is “about supporting any location or device, particularly tablets, because the customers don’t know how to support demand from end users.”

According to Thomsen, partners are not equipped to deal with the sale: “They are still stuck in the technical approach, the project-based approach,” he maintains. “They don’t know how to approach the decision makers.”

As such, the vendor has now signed up 300 of its channel organisations – almost 1000 individuals – to its in-depth sales programme, Elite, which focuses on “finding the best sales people in EMEA”.

Says Thomsen: “We invited partners who fitted to criteria to join the programme. It really is a programme – it’s not a one-off engagement or sales training. It’s a twelve month cycle we do with our partners.

“It’s about enterprise selling. It’s about strategic selling. We have coaching sessions where we work on their pipeline – which we’ve never done before – and have joint customer visits.”

Thomsen says UK partners Computacenter and Kelway both said they had never seen anything similar in the industry before: “At Computacenter we’re training hundreds of individuals.”

The combined market share of the three hundred partners now represents 57 percent of Citrix’s EMEA revenue – up from 46 percent last year.