Fortinet and Exclusive Networks have produced a series of videos to answer key questions about how partnering benefits your company – here are some edited highlights…
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WELCOME TO THE PARTNER COMMUNITY
Carl Berry, Distribution Manager at Fortinet welcomes new partners to the Fortinet Partner Program explaining some of the benefits to expect. Chris Leggett, Fortinet Business Unit Director at Exclusive Networks, explains best next steps once you’re signed up.
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Fortinet is committed to the Channel with 100% of revenue transactions through our Partner community.
The relationship held with our UK distributor, Exclusive Networks, has been built on trust, endeavour and a willingness to adapt which has enabled our Partners to drive profitability.
The UK Fortinet scene from a sales, marketing and technical perspective continues to grow and the acceleration of our revenue is truly inspiring.
Its also important that we respect the view of the independent analysts, like NSS labs and Gartner to name two, who provide a truly balanced view.
I look forward to engaging with you in the future and once again thank you for choosing Fortinet.
Once you’ve signed up as an authorised partner you’ll receive an email from Fortinet. This will be closely followed by a member of the Exclusive Networks team who will contact you with the aim to understand your business in more depth and how they can support you on your journey.
An onboarding kit will be issued which will include a whole raft of information and detailed next steps.
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UNDERSTANDING DEAL REGISTRATION
Chris Leggett, Fortinet Business Unit Director at Exclusive Networks and Carl Berry, Distribution Manager at Fortinet explain the Deal Registration process, why deals should be registered, the benefits, how it protects the reseller, who should consider it and how to access the Deal Registration tool.
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Deal Registration offers active, committed partners protection on significant deals of £10,000+.
Deal Registration offers active partners enhanced commercial and technical support which has been proven to increase the win ratio.
What are the benefits? Benefits include commercials, protection from the competition and an increased level of both sales and technical support to enhance the ability to succeed in partnership.
How does it protect me? When a Deal Registration has been approved it is valid for 90 days and no other partner can receive the benefits of Deal Registration. We recognise that proactive partner-led opportunities need a level of protection.
How do I Deal Register? Before registering an opportunity a level of understanding should have been reached. Deal Registration is accessed via Fortinet Partner Portal
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WHAT IS CTAP AND WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS
Mike Ryan, Fortinet Vendor Manager at Exclusive Networks explains the Fortinet Cyber Threat Assessment Program (CTAP), how resellers can use it to reduce the sales cycle, land, compete, renew and expand prospect opportunities and other benefits of the program for resellers and customers
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CTAP is an acronym for the Fortinet Cyber Threat Assessment Program. Its designed to help you during greenfield and renewal opportunities expand your business and give customers an indepth view of the current state of their network.
What are the benefits for the customer?
CTAP can provide your customer with an impressive insight into security and threat prevention, user productivity and network utilisation without compromising performance or adding latency. Most importantly the CTAP report will translate this information into recommended actions your customer can take and mitigate security and threat concerns, improve user productivity and optimise network utilisation with Fortigate’s granular control over applications, users and content.
How do I get involved?
Exclusive Networks have a loan pool so you can borrow CTAP units. We can help with the first CTAP you run, shadowing and training your team so that you can start to do these yourselves.
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ACCESSING THE PARTNER PORTAL
Stephen Martin, Channel Account Manager at Fortinet, explains what the Fortinet Partner Portal offers resellers, the content and tools available, how to access it, who can add or edit users and the url address to register.
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What does the Partner Portal offer me? There’s a huge amount of information available on the Fortinet Partner Portal, including the latest news and updates… sales tools, battle cards and webinars.
Its where you can access the Deal Registration dashboard and the links to the online NSC partner training portal. You get details of the latest promotions available via Fortirewards… find a link to the marketing materials… get started on social media with an engagement and amplification tool… find product information and access the asset library and much more.
How do we access the Partner Portal?
If you are a brand new partner to Fortinet you can register by visiting partnerportal.fortinet.com and signing up. The person who completed the application form becomes the lead admin for your company and can add or edit company users.
There’s no limit on the number of users and anyone who needs NSC training must have a login.
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HOW TO MAXIMISE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES
Stephen Martin takes us through some suggestions to maximise your opportunities with the various upsell and cross sell opportunities such as the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiiCare 360, multi-year, switches and APs, or services such as consultancy, pre-sales, training or finance and leasing.
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With Fortinet offering such a large range of solutions that work together there are plenty of opportunities for up selling and cross selling across the security fabric portfolio.
Organisations can’t keep using separate security solutions that don’t talk to other devices on the network, that require separate management and collaboration tools. The inability to share threat intelligence or synchronise makes threat response times slower. They can really benefit from an integrated, collaborative system of tools that work together to monitor their network, share information and respond to threats no matter where they occur.
Forticare 360?
Forticare 360 – if you’re already selling 24/7 support with your Fortinet solutions then why not try upselling to Fortinet 360? Powered by Fortinet’s cloud-based analytics platform, Fortinet 360 offers advanced security support and cloud subscription services that pro-actively detect and re-mediate real or potential performance for security issues on Fortigate and Fortiwifi devices.
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OVERCOMING BUDGET OBJECTIONS
Chris Armitage from exclusive networks explains how our finance and leasing services works, the cover available, benefits to resellers and customers, how it can accelerate the sales process, how it differs from other sources of finance and who to contact with any questions or enquiries.
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There are two main areas of our new proposition, the first is giving vendors and resellers the ability to overcome the most frequent and obvious obstacles to progressing a sale which are cost, budget and timing.
The second is enabling sellers to convert an opportunity from a short-term one year subscription or renewal to a longer term, typically 3 or 5 year upfront commitment.
How do we do this?
Often the upfront cost of the equipment for a solution might not have been fully budgeted for by the customer. We simply spread the cost over a period of time which can be anything between 1 and 5 years, with repayments at monthly, quarterly or annual intervals.
To address timing or budget issues we can commence the payment stream with a holiday or deferred payment. The customer has the benefit of the solution immediately but does not start paying for it until they have available budget.
On the budgeting point, sellers are often told that the customer does not have sufficient Capex budget. But we can overcome this by structuring the finance on an Opex, or operating expense basis.
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You can view all the videos in full at: https://www.exclusivelyfortinet.com/how-to/videos/
