Lexmark takes its partners to the races

Lexmark will fly four of its highest-performing corporate resellers to the motorcar racing event, Indi 2004. The vendor is a sponsor of the event, which will be held at Gold Coast in Australia in October, this year.

This is the first time Lexmark is taking its partners to an event like this and it expects to spend Rs 3 lakh per winner. Partners will be taken to the pit stops, given VIP tickets for the races and can also interact with the car drivers. 

Corporate resellers who achieve targets set for the AMJ and JAS quarters will be selected for this trip. Lexmark hopes that this incentive will encourage more printer resellers to upscale themselves to corporate sales, where the focus is on providing ned-to-end solutions around printers. At the moment it has less than 10 partners in this category. 

Says PG Kamath, Country General Manager, Lexmark India, "We want more partners to focus on solution providing, which sadly is not happening with printers. These are looked as peripherals, rather than a solution product itself." 

At the same time, Kamath does not want to simply go for the number game, and add more partners to its corporate reseller network. He wants to do business with only those partners who are focused on printers and want to use printers as the core component of their entire solution offering. 

VINITA BHATIA

CI News Bureau

Mumbai

July 2, 2004