D&H Canada general manager Greg Tobin poses the question: “When’s the last time you got a call from a trade credit department saying ‘We have good news for you’?”

Sure, increased consumer lines of credit are pretty much awaiting us every time we go to the mailbox. But for distributors? Yeah, not so much.

To be fair, the “last time” for many D&H resellers was about a year ago, when the distributor raised credit for about 1,000 D&H customers to the tune of a combined $10 million.

And now the distributor is back at it again, announcing boosted credit lines for about 100 of its smaller VARs in partnership with Cisco and Lenovo

“Consider this one to be credit increases for the S in the SMB,” Tobin said. “We called them up and said we could almost double their lines with us in some cases.”

The distributor targeted resellers with credit lines between $2,500 and $30,000, with new credit lines going as high as $40,000. In the past, it’s done so as what it calls a “business assurance program” – keeping credit available when it was hardest to come by over the last few years.

This time, there’s a little bit of a different feeling. The distributor is letting resellers with newly enlarged credit lines know about it, and is following up with multiple touch points at the reseller. The goal of the program is clear.

“We want to will up those lines with products from the participating vendors,” Tobin said.

And that’s where the push will be. The credit remains available for whatever a solution provider may want to use it on, but D&H will be promoting and suggesting options from participating partners Cisco and Lenovo first and foremost with the new credit.

Tobin said along with the size of the existing line of credit, D&H looked at remaining capacity and utilization of that existing credit in identifying partners for a credit boost. In that traditional credit fashion, resellers who were at the top of their lines but paying the expected amounts in a timely manner were given the first kick at it.

With its experience with two rounds of its Business Assurance Program credit extensions over the last two years, the distributor has some experience with the subject, and Tobin said whenever D&H has raised credit lines in the past “it’s always been a win-win for both parties.”

“This will be the exact same thing this time,” Tobin said.

Except this time, the goal will be to make it a three-way win, with Cisco and Lenovo also playing key roles in the promotion.

As far as how successful previous rounds of credit extension have been – Tobin declined to discuss specifics, but hinted that the distributor would be sharing more in-depth details of the results of its Business Assurance Program in the near future.