The new initiative involves monthly credit extensions for Canadian partners, new vendor programs, and increased headcount.
Michael Schwab, D&H co-president
SMB-focused distributor D&H Canada has announced the expansion of their new BFG initiative into Canada. BFG – which stands for Built for Growth, Generations, and Giving – involves a series of new investments. These include ramping up monthly credit extensions for Canadian partners, new vendor programs with Cisco, HP and Acer, and an increased headcount of over 100 new positions in North America. The overall objective is to double its business over the next two fiscal years.
“This is a true North American initiative, which was only announced in the U.S. in the last 30 days,” said Michael Schwab, D&H co-president. “The goal here is to create a North American Go-to-Market strategy. When you think of the reseller community, having separate American and Canadian strategies doesn’t make sense. We are looking at this a little differently.”
The recently closed merger of SYNNEX and Tech Data into TD-SYNNEX is one of the factors behind the new strategy.
“I believe there is no better time to be in IT distribution than this exact moment,” Schwab said. “We have been in Canada since 2007, and I have seen my fair share of mergers and attrition, so now you only have a small handful of full line distributors. This one opened everyone’s eyes in the manufacturer community and reseller community. Vendors need to propagate choice in their procurement strategies. From a reseller perspective, they want to be sure they have enough credit, as if there was no merger. So we are providing additional credit and working with manufacturers to provide expanded line cards. It’s too early to tell what that merger impact will be – but for us, it’s time to invest.”
The credit extensions consist of $50 million each month for Canadian partners.
“If we offer Net 30 terms and an extra $50 million in credit monthly in Canada, we can expand our business by $600 million,” Schwab said. “We wanted to make sure we had a runway for expansion.”
Schwab expects most of this will go to smaller and midsize resellers who are in more need of such credit.
“The CDWs and SHIs haven’t had credit constraints, and have little need to access more,” he indicated. “It’s more the midsized and smaller resellers where this will be sourced. Those resellers aren’t big enough to buy from manufacturers on a direct basis, and rely on us for sourcing, training and understanding road maps.”
The new programs are all expansions of existing vendor relationships, through joint programs with D&H.
D&H’s relationship with HP has been expanded o so that: D&H is now able to sell HP’s CTO [configure to order] personal systems to all authorized HP partners.
“We weren’t really an HP CTO order distributor before,” Schwab said. “It was BTO [build to order] and their standard high velocity SKUs. But there’s now strong demand for systems with things like special memory – more specialized products.”
D&H has also introduced the enhanced Cisco Pro 2.0 partner program, which helps partners accelerate their Cisco sales through specialized resources, certification training, incentives, and demand generation activities, with a key focus on Cisco’s cloud solutions.
“Cisco on steroids is how I describe this,” Schwab said. “Security and network security are so relevant in IT deployments, but the challenge is that it’s a complicated process around manufacturer training and certification. We are addressing this with new investments in sales support, specialists, and technical pre-sales.”
The new Acer Navigator partner program is offered exclusively through D&H Canada. It grants partners dedicated sales resources and exclusive incentives for the sale of Acer’s commercial line of TravelMate personal systems.
“Acer has a strong business portfolio in its TravelMate series, and they do fairly well in Canada,” Schwab noted. “We have a good relationship with them and also sell their monitors. We wanted to come up with a programmatic way to incentivize the reseller community to take advantage of their technology. We are still in a state where you need to raise awareness of alternative brands, especially with major ones now having product shortages.”
D&H Canada also added Samsung’s Large Format Display units to its line card in October, building on their portfolio of Samsung’s small format displays.
“Samsung is the premier brand in large format displays,” Schwab said. “We have had success there in the U.S. market and are excited to support that growth opportunity.”
Partners can also view content from D&H Canada’s THREADcast virtual engagement at www.dandh.ca/threadcast, which debuted on 10/28 and are available afterward on-demand, including topics like cloud solutions, opportunities in gaming, and sessions from Cisco and Lenovo.
The over new employees in North America will be added during this year.
“We think about headcount a lot and we never offshore any reseller-facing engagement,” Schwab stated. “We think that’s part of our value proposition. So we are adding inside sales staff, and marketing resources, increased technical and specialist support, and badged employees dedicated to supporting resellers. Because of the pandemic, we have been able to hire really talented people who were geographically dispersed, who we might not have hired before. Now with video, it’s easy to work with dispersed employees.”
Giving is also a key part of BFG.
“Part of our role is also giving back to community, and local organizations,” Schwab said. This includes recent participation in the “Build Together, Give Together Challenge” with several manufacturer partners such as ASUS North America. D&H’s fall channel initiative benefitted “Child’s Play,” a charity dedicated to improving the lives of children in hospitals around the world.
