What VARs Actually Expect From Vendors (And Why Most Fall Short)

A VAR account manager carries a bag with fifty vendors in it. On a good day, they're actively selling five of them. Most of the rest exist as a line in a price book and nothing more. The question every vendor should be asking is: what separates the five from the forty-five?

It's not always margin. It's not always the product. It's the totality of what it feels like to work with you — the speed of your approvals, the quality of your support, whether your partner programme creates friction or removes it. VARs make a continuous calculation about where to invest their sales effort. If working with you is harder than working with a competitor, you lose the calculation, even if you win the spec.

Here is what VARs actually expect from vendors — the things that, when missing, cause even technically superior products to gather dust.

Deal Protection That Means Something

This is non-negotiable, and it's the first thing a VAR's commercial team will ask about before committing to your programme. Deal registration is only valuable if it actually protects the deal. That means three things:

• Fast approvals. A VAR account manager registers a deal on Tuesday. If they haven't heard back by Thursday, they'll assume it isn't coming and continue without confirmation. Your 2-day SLA needs to be real, not aspirational.
• Genuine exclusivity. When the deal is registered, the VAR needs to know you won't quote the same opportunity to a competitor or go direct to the end customer. If VARs have been burned before, they won't trust the system — and they won't register the next deal.
• A clear conflict resolution process. When two resellers register the same prospect (it will happen), you need a documented, consistent process for adjudicating it. “Whoever got there first wins” is fine, as long as it's written down and applied consistently.

A vendor who doesn't protect deals will not get deals registered. And a vendor who doesn't get deals registered has no pipeline visibility — which means no ability to forecast, no opportunity to support, and no early warning when a deal is at risk.

Simple, Transparent Commercials

VARs work in high volumes and tight margins. They don't have time to work out what they're going to earn on a deal by reading a 40-page partner programme guide. Your commercial structure needs to be simple enough that an account manager can do the calculation in their head.

The simplest structures work best:

• A clear margin percentage by tier
• A deal registration uplift (e.g. an additional 5% on registered deals)
• A simple rebate schedule, published quarterly

What kills engagement: back-end rebate structures so complex that the VAR commercial team needs a spreadsheet model to estimate the payout. Complex incentive structures aren't motivating — they're ignored, because no one wants to bet sales effort on a payout they can't calculate.

Publish your commission schedule. Make it visible in the partner portal. A VAR who has to email your channel manager to find out what they'll earn on a deal has already lost confidence in the programme.

Pre-Sales and Technical Support That Actually Shows Up

On a competitive bid, the VAR is often the one writing the technical response. If your pre-sales resource is hard to access, slow to respond, or delivers generic collateral that doesn't address the customer's specific questions, the VAR is going to write the bid themselves — and recommend the vendor with the better support next time.

What good pre-sales support looks like from a VAR's perspective:

• A named technical contact they can call, not a support queue
• Demo environments the VAR can access independently
• Quick turnaround on RFP responses (24 hours, not a week)
• Willingness to be on calls with the end customer when needed
• Bill of materials assistance for complex configurations

Vendors who invest in pre-sales support at the VAR level consistently win more deals through that VAR. It sounds obvious. It's remarkable how few vendors do it well.

Enablement That Respects Their Time

A VAR account manager doesn't have 4 hours to sit through a product training webinar. They have 30 minutes between customer calls and they need to be able to walk into a conversation confidently. Your enablement content needs to be designed for their reality, not your marketing team's preferred format.

The most useful enablement assets for a VAR's front-line:

• A one-page positioning statement. What does your product do, who does it replace, what problem does it solve, what's the pricing range? One page. Printable.
• Battle cards, not datasheets. How do you beat Vendor X in a competitive situation? The VAR needs the answer, not a feature comparison matrix.
• A 5-minute pitch. What would you say to a customer in a lift? The VAR account manager will adapt it — but they need the starting point.
• Reference customers the VAR can mention. “We helped [similar company] achieve [outcome]” is worth more in a discovery conversation than any amount of product specification.

The enablement mistake vendors make most often is confusing completeness with usefulness. A 200-slide product deck is not enablement. Neither is a monthly newsletter full of company news. VARs need tools that help them sell — not content that demonstrates your product team's thoroughness.

An MDF Programme That Pays Out

MDF is only a benefit if the process of claiming it doesn't cost more in time than the money is worth. VARs who have been through long, bureaucratic claims processes with ambiguous approval criteria will not engage with your MDF programme — even if the budget is generous.

The best vendor MDF programmes are characterised by:

• Clear, pre-published eligible activity types
• A straightforward submission process (online form, not an email chain)
• Fast pre-approval (within 5 business days)
• Defined reimbursement timeline — and consistent adherence to it
• A single point of contact who can answer questions without escalation

If a VAR submits an MDF claim in August and it isn't settled until November, they won't apply for MDF in Q1 next year. The budget line in your partner programme guide becomes a talking point that nobody believes.

A Partner Portal Worth Logging Into

Many vendors underestimate how much the quality of their partner portal signals the quality of the overall programme. A partner portal that's slow, poorly organised, or requires three phone calls to your channel team to navigate sends a clear message: this programme is not a priority for you, so why should it be a priority for the VAR?

At a minimum, a VAR should be able to log in and immediately find:

• Their current tier status and what it takes to move up
• The deal registration form and the status of any registered deals
• The latest version of every piece of sales collateral
• Their commission balance and pending payouts
• MDF balance, pending requests, and approved activities
• Their partner agreement

A VAR who has to email you to get any of this information will eventually stop emailing and start recommending a different vendor instead.

Responsiveness That Matches Their Sales Cycle

VAR account managers work at pace. When a customer opportunity emerges, there's often a window of days — not weeks — to submit a proposal, get approval on a price, or arrange a product demo. Vendors who respond within that window win the opportunity. Vendors who take a week to come back lose it, and lose the next one too, because the account manager has learned not to rely on them.

Define your response SLAs clearly — for deal approvals, for pre-sales support requests, for MDF applications — and stick to them. If you can't staff for a 48-hour deal approval SLA, that's a resourcing question to fix before you recruit VARs, not after.

The Conversation You Need to Have at the Start

When you recruit a new VAR, the most important conversation is the one most vendors skip: what does success look like for both parties in year one?

Be specific. How many deals do you expect the VAR to register? What pipeline target would make this a worthwhile investment for your team? What does the VAR need from you — joint customer calls, technical support, co-funded events — to get there?

VARs who have a clear 90-day activation plan, with defined milestones and a named contact on your side, consistently outperform those who signed a partner agreement and then heard nothing for six months. The programme only works if both sides have made a commitment they both remember.