Inside guide to growing your public sector sales
August 2, 2016 Leave a comment
By Troy Fortune, VP, Infrastructure and Channels
As we head into the busy season, your company should be thinking about maximizing its financial capabilities. Did you know immixGroup has a suite of financial solutions? It’s one of the benefits of being part of Arrow Electronics, a Fortune 119 company.
June 6, 2016 Leave a comment
By Bob Laclede, Channels VP
We’re thrilled to announce that immixGroup’s own Tina Peeples (pictured) and several leaders from our parent company, Arrow Electronics, were named to the Channel Company’s CRN Women of the Channel for 2016.
Working with Tina the last few years, I’m not surprised she’s being recognized. The 7-year immixGroup veteran has tirelessly led the company’s renewals business through 52 percent growth in the last year, along with overseeing the sales ops and inside sales teams. You’ll often hear Tina talk about “protect, predict, and grow” when describing how her team approaches a customer’s public sector business.
April 25, 2016 1 Comment
By Bob Laclede, Channels VP
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since immixGroup was acquired by Arrow Electronics, a Fortune 131 company. The acquisition, which was finalized at the end of March 2015, dramatically changed immixGroup for the better, making us the largest value-added distributor of enterprise IT products in the public sector.
What’s unique is that this is a reverse integration, meaning that immixGroup is now responsible for Arrow’s federal business and serves as the public sector arm of Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions. It’s been a smooth, but busy process over the last year. It reminds me of a duck swimming on a pond—everything looks calm above the surface, but there’s a lot going on down below.
So immixGroup channels director Pat Cruciani and I took about 10 minutes to detail all the changes in this on-demand Webinar. Don’t worry, the changes are all for the better. Here’s a little preview of what you’ll hear:
March 15, 2016 Leave a comment
by Bob Laclede, Vice President, Channels
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has dusted off a 2011 policy for stamping out “unnecessary” government-wide acquisition contracts. With so much time left to do business in FY 2016, it’s time to review the fundamentals of a good GWAC strategy. And a few of the techniques manufacturers can use to maintain or even boost their federal sales even if they don’t have a prime contract on one of the main GWACs.
What I’m suggesting may sound obvious, yet I’ve heard so many manufacturers over the years complain that they’re blocked out of this or that agency or requirement because they miscalculated their GWAC strategy. Read more of this post
December 23, 2015 Leave a comment
by Allan Rubin, Vice President, Marketing 
immixGroup’s 2nd Annual Government IT Sales Summit is done, but thanks to the magic of Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee, it lives on forever on the Web (well maybe not forever).
This year’s event attracted nearly 1,000 sales, marketing, channel, and business executives from the public sector IT community who all came with one purpose: to get real-world perspectives and actionable information that helps them increase their government sales.
Since many of you tried but failed to be in two places at once, we’ve got a treat for you: video and audio recordings of all 19 sessions (as well as downloadable presentations) are now available on demand at immixgroup.com/summit2015.
Sessions explore everything from the newest technology developments in Big Data, Cybersecurity, and The Internet of Things to the latest government IT priorities and what they mean for technology companies that sell their products to the government. Watch the keynote address by Walter Isaacson (highly recommended), panel discussions led by government IT leaders, and the 11th Annual DOD and Civilian Budget Briefings (our most popular sessions by far)— anytime, anywhere.
If you’ve got some extra time to kill over the holidays, grab a notepad and check out some of the videos. They’ll help you start strong in January.
November 11, 2015 Leave a comment
by Tomas O’Keefe, Consultant
Government is raising the bar for competition, making management of contract vehicles more complicated through increased reporting requirements and consolidation of spend into large systems development vehicles. Competing in this environment is becoming more and more challenging for technology vendors with limited resources to balance between managing and growing their business. Identifying an optimal go-to-market strategy is critical for technology suppliers to expand their public sector footprint, but finding the best path forward isn’t always cut and dry. With this in mind, how should technology companies proceed?
August 12, 2015 Leave a comment
by Bob Laclede, Vice President, Channels
There’s 
little doubt that deal registration continues to pull its weight as a mechanism to reward and encourage reseller partners. But when it comes down to managing day-to-day deals in the real world, many partners find existing programs a bit of a chore, our latest research finds.
In particular, the challenges of registering, submitting, updating, and maintaining deals represent significant administrative burdens to partners, according to the Government Channel Leadership Council’s (GCLC) 2015 State of Public Sector Deal Registration survey. The research, conducted in the first quarter of 2015, queried 120 partners 100 vendors that deal in the public sector marketplace.
Immediately clear in this year’s research: Channel partners surveyed want vendors to wring out complexity in current programs and streamline the registration and approval processes. Some 39 percent of partners say that vendors’ deal registration programs are only moderately clear, concise, and well-documented, with 15 percent giving OEMs overall poor marks for the clarity and usability of their programs.
February 11, 2015 Leave a comment
by Steve Charles, Co-founder and Executive Vice President
OEMs and channel partners
are constantly asking questions about what passes muster in federal as acceptable practice for rewarding partners who help OEM’s make sales.The issue invariably leads to detailed conversations about what constitutes anything of value to induce a sale under the Anti-Kickback Act, or what constitutes price fixing under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, and finally what constitutes unequal treatment of similarly situated partners under the Robinson-Patman Act.
The good thing for OEMs is that they get to structure their channel programs as they see fit, and increasingly in all sectors, deal registration is the way to reward partners for performing programmatic activities needed by the OEM to address certain market segments. This is especially true at the Enterprise sales level and conversely, is practically irrelevant in the commoditized SMB channel.
February 9, 2015 Leave a comment
by Bob Laclede, Vice President, Channels
There seems to be a growing consensus these days, among the public sector IT manufacturer and the channel partner community, that deal registration programs just aren’t working and often lead to a great deal of frustration on both ends; this is why we’ve created the Government Channel Leadership Council (GCLC) Survey.
GCLC’s anonymous survey aims to help IT manufacturers and channel partners improve deal or opportunity registration programs within the public sector IT marketplace. The tabulation of results will be available this spring as a formal report.
Survey participants will not only be entered to win $100 but will also be the first to receive exclusive access to this comprehensive report.
I urge you to take or survey by Friday, February 13 (it will take you less than 10 minutes!)
• If you’re an IT manufacturer or distributor, click here to begin the survey
• If you’re a value-added reseller, solution provider or systems integrator click here to begin the survey
About GCLC
The Government Channel Leadership Council (GCLC), was created to provide a forum for sharing best practices, information, and ideas about the public sector IT market. Today the council is jointly chaired by Skip Liesegang, Director Distribution Sales, Americas at NetApp and Bob Laclede, Vice President, Channels at immixGroup. GCLC members include channel management executives
May 22, 2014 1 Comment
We’ve been hearing it quite a bit from our manufacturer clients and channel partners recently: it’s tough out there. Companies that sell technology to the government have faced one challenge after another. Most of us survived Sequestration, continuing resolutions, and the shutdown — often with some scars to show for it — and we hope those are in the rear-view mirror for good.
Uncle Sam is still spending a lot of money on technology products and services, but that growth curve has flattened, and budget pressures have increased competition for every order. Add to that the significant shifts we’ve seen in technology requirements, acquisition methods, the movement towards lowest-price technically acceptable (LPTA) procurements, difficulty in meeting face-to-face with customers…and the increased pressure you’ve probably seen from your corporate office to exceed revenue goals while cutting back on personnel, marketing, and other resources. There’s a long list of reasons for those in our industry to lose sleep.
Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. Pockets of technology, like cyber security, remain strong with growing demand. The state and local market is heating up. While some agencies and programs face budget cuts, others are expected to invest more heavily in IT products and services. There are reasons to be optimistic, but you have to know where to look … and what to look for.
Government Sales Insider 