During the month of January we took on the idea of bringing post sales back into Ingram Micro’s technical support for the Xenapp Fundamentals product line.  Before we can fully commit to this project we have to have a lot of questions that need to be answered.  We are currently going through these issues now seeing if this idea can become a reality.  This avenue of support will enable our value in tech support to be even further defined to Citrix, to our VAR partners and their end users for the fundamentals product line.

This past month James has been working with Jeff on scheduling another webinar for James to present.  It was scheduled and arranged for the licensing Microsoft with Citrix Xendesktop presentation to be presented to our VARs on March 8th.  This webinar will be a valuable addition to easing the confusion in the minds’ of our VARs looking to purchase Citrix Xendesktop through Ingram Micro.

During January James developed a new Citrix presales technician ramp-up.  This is designed to give technicians a familiarity with the type of questions that they will be presented with in our average day-to-day environment.  This ramp-up is essential for any new Citrix technician that will be enabling Citrix sales on our technical support line.  With increased support on the line we will be able to enable Citrix sales in a more timely fashion.

In order for James to get more familiar with how technical support can get even more integrated with the other departments, James and Eli decided that it was beneficial to have James sit in with Eli to understand more of what he does on a daily basis.  The sit-in provided James with insight into how he can leverage Eli to a much greater degree in order to further enable Citrix sales through Ingram Micro.

During the second week in January James received a call from a VAR that had a PO in hand for a rather large Citrix deployment.  The issue that he was having was that he was unable to obtain authorization to sell Citrix.  He had contacted Citrix on multiple occasions and was told that it would be taken care of with no resolve.  Due to his sit-in with Eli, James was aware that Eli would be an excellent contact in this scenario.  Eli quickly jumped on this opportunity and helped in getting the reseller authorized.  Actions like the above show how resellers can help leverage Ingram for situations to increase the sales of Citrix.

Over the past month we have had a couple instances where customers are setting up proof of concept deployments for their end users using the trial software that Citrix provides.  Unfortunately, during the POC VARs often run into situations where their POC is not working.  One instance that Lisa Jensen from Citrix was involved in created a negative customer experience due to not having an avenue in place for these customers to obtain support. This issue could be easily resolved if Citrix post sales support would have a team in place that would charge the customer a reasonable fee to acquire support for their POCs. 
