Peter Jay  
Vice President & Managing Director of South Asia & APAC Channels, Jabra

A 100% CHANNEL ROUTE
Jabra has been in India and the rest of the South Asian market for the last 25 years; essentially the company initially catered to the needs of the contact center, when it was a booming industry in India.

“What this industry required was essentially very good audio devices which could provide crystal clear voice to their customers and also comfort to their agents,” reminisces Peter Jay, Vice President & Managing Director of South Asia & APAC Channels, Jabra. “During this time, there was a big move towards Unified Communication as a lot of industries, especially the IT industry started embracing it. So that’s when we started working with a lot of these partners who provide IT equipment and supporting services to these multinational and software companies, besides the non IT sector and small and medium businesses. So that’s how we expanded our growth in the last 10 years and our main focus has always been to have a trained partner base.”

Globally, Jabra has always been 100% indirect and would always work along with its partners. The company has this model which it calls ‘Direct Touch, Indirect fulfillment’, which enables Jabra to engage with end customers along with partners to understand their needs, understand the pain points, and define the solution. But the transaction thereafter and the fulfillment is done only by its partners.

CUSTOMIZED PRODUCTS TO MEET VARIED NEEDS
Jabra has been one organization which has always placed great emphasis on innovation. The brand ensures to go to the customers first and study the market to understand the workplace trends every six months.  
“So our products and solutions are based on those findings. In line with the new trends that we saw in the working space, Jabra launched its first range of Evolve products, which was also fueled by the UC growth. Then during the Covid times, almost 100% of the global workforce was working from home. This necessitated different styles of working and different kinds of need came into the picture. That’s when we built the second generation of the Evolve products (Evolve2). We had both wired and wireless headsets, starting from Evolve2 30, Evolve2 40, Evolve2 50 in the wired category and Evolve2 65, Evolve2 75 and Evolve2 85 in the wireless category catering to different needs,” explains Peter.
During the same time, Jabra also developed the PanaCast range of video bars which was an all-in-one video bar with excellent microphone quality, and speakers as an easy-to-use meeting room solution.

FOSTERING STRONG PARTNERSHIPS
As Jabra started signing up and expanding its partner base, Jabra realized that it was very important to equip them with knowledge and tools for them to go and interact with the customers.
“When we say knowledge, it is not just about informing them about the products but taking them through the industry needs, industry pain points and about the evolving technology trends. So this knowledge transfer is a continuous process that we do with our partners. We also help our partners in generating leads, whether it is with their existing customer, or helping them get new potential customers,” says Peter.
Jabra also has something called account management, where it works with a set of premium partners. Jabra’s account managers would interact with them frequently and help them build account plans.
“Before any new product hits the market, we make sure that partners are a part of our product knowledge sessions. We also have this partner portal called YellowHub, where our premium partners are registered, and they get access to all the information. There are also online training courses available which partners can go through and get certified. So these are some of the things we have to equip and empower our partners,” explains Peter.
Jabra not only caters to the market requirement, but also caters to the partner aspirations. Among the strategies that Jabra has set, one key priority is channel expansion. “With both India and the South Asia market growing, adoption of high-end technology is also on the rise. More and more customers are going ahead with execution of large voice projects where they are equipping their end users or employees with headsets for seamless communication and a better audio experience. Along with audio devices, big meeting rooms are also being video enabled. So for a brand like us, the market is growing for both personal audio as well as audio video equipment,” concludes Peter.