Resellers Handbook

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Lead Referral

Leads at GitLab are valuable, and do not age well. If we refer a lead to you, we have certain expectations on how it will be handled.

Lead referral and follow up

When GitLab refers leads to you, the lead will have received an email introduction to you first. That introduction may look a little like this (usually in local language):

Greetings Customer Name,

I hope this finds you well.

Thank you for your interest in GitLab. Since you are in Territory, and have begun an evaluation of GitLab EE, I wanted to introduce you to our local partner, Partner Name. Partner can be reached at <GitLab@partnerTLD>. If you need any assistance during your evaluation, I would encourage you to reach out to them.

You are, of course, welcome to contact GitLab directly should you desire.

GitLab employee signature block

When responding to the customer, please be sure to cc Email to Salesforce so that your activity is tracked.

The lead will likely continue to be qualified by the GitLab direct employee until it is obvious that they are working with you.
If the lead makes a buying decision and we see no activity from you on the lead, credit for the purchase will go to the direct team.
Therefore it is very important that you include Email to Salesforce on the cc:line of your emails as this will log your activity in our Salesfoce.com system.

Lead Aging - 1 week

If a lead is unmodified (by not having received a reply for instance) for 1 week, the lead will then receive a follow up email in English that could look somewhat like this:

Greetings Customer Name

I hope this finds you well. I wanted to follow up on our introduction of partner the other day. Have you spoken with them yet? Is there anything that perhaps I can do for you?

GitLab employee signature block

Lead aging - 2 weeks

If the lead goes a further week without being updated or responded to; then the lead will be reassigned to either a direct sales person or another reseller.

Closing a deal

The steps to closing a deal are:

Deal Registration
Sign a quote
Customer accepts EULA
Customer receives license key
Remitting payment to GitLab

Deal Registration

GitLab requires deal registration. This process is to let us know which deals you are working on so that we can plan accordingly, and also helps prevent channel conflict.

GitLab will not accept an order, give a quote, issue an evaluation license, nor pay commissions if a deal has not been registered.
If we reject your registration because another has already registered the deal, and you still fulfill the order, we will usually offer a fulfillment fee.

You can register a deal either through SFDC by clicking the "Submit for approval" button on a lead, or by completing the deal registration form

When you complete the registration, we get notified and will allow us to do the following:

Check our systems for opportunity approval
If approved provide deal protection
Create an opportunity in our SFDC implementation
Provide you with a quote
Note: this is a reseller quote, not to be shared with the customer.
Provide you with sales support and pre-sales technical assistance
Send you an evaluation license for the customer. See evaluations section below
Send you an email with any other intelligence that we may have on this account; possibly including:
- GitLab CE usage (if any) from GitLab Version Check.
- Other usage elsewhere at that company and their affiliates
- Contact details of the GitLab sales rep that has been working with that company in the past (if any)
- Our SFDC opportunity name (in case you need to reference it to us)

Receive a GitLab reseller quote

Attached below is a sample quote. When you request a quote, you will receive a document that looks like this. Yours may differ slightly. This quote reflects your reseller price exclusive of incentive bonus's and is not meant for the end customer. You will need to generate your own quote to the end customer.

The quote will come with a Sertifi link. E-signing the quote with Sertifi will initiate the invoicing process and cause our systems to invoice you. Do not e-sign the quote until you are ready to be invoiced. Do not e-sign the quote if your customer will be paying us directly.

Note that we will not generate a quote, or fulfill an order, without an end user contact complete with email, shipping address, and postal code.

sample reseller invoice

License Key Delivery

Once the order is invoiced and the customer accepts the EULA, they will be able to download their GitLab license key. Note that you will not receive a license key, it goes directly to the customer.

Remitting payment to GitLab

You can arrange for payment either via invoice, or your customer can pay us directly.

Customer pays us directly

If your customer will be paying us directly, you must inform us of that before it happens, or risk getting credit for the opportunity. If they pay us directly, then you will receive your margin with your quarterly VIR cheque.

By Credit Card

If your customer wishes to pay by credit card, you can simply direct them to https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/.

By purchase order

If your customer will be paying us via a Purchase Order, then you must email us a copy of the PO so we may invoice the customer. The best way to do this is to forward the PO to sales@gitlab.com, cc: the customer, and bcc: the Email to Salesforce address. This will make sure that the PO gets attached to the appropriate opportunity record.

Paying via Invoice

To pay via invoice, simply e-sign the reseller quote to initiate an invoice then remit payment in USD to the bank listed on your quote.

Execute the GitLab EULA

All orders will require an executed EULA. There are 3 methods of obtaining a EULA:

Customer pays GitLab directly In this instance, GitLab will obtain the EULA from the customer.
License Key Deployment The default for reseller orders is that the end customer will receive a link to download their license key. The customer will have to click an acceptance of terms in order to get their key.
Physical signature Some customers may require a fully countersigned document. When you obtain the signed document from the customer, please scan it and email it to sales@gitlab.com, with a cc: to the customer and Email to Salesforce

An order is not complete without a signed agreement.

Email to SFDC

At GitLab, we regularly review our leads for activity. In order to make that way less painful than asking you to fill out a spreadsheet, or sit through a long phone call; we will enable mailto SFDC for your email accounts that will be interacting with GitLab leads.

To use

When replying to leads, please include the SFDC reseller email address on the cc:line of the email.
This will create an activity record on the contact, lead, account, and opportunity records that match the people on the to: and cc: lines.
This will show up on the Lead Activity report, and make everyone happy that the leads we are referring to you are showing activity.
You will be able to see all of this activity when you log into our SFDC Community portal.

Evaluation licenses for prospects

We will issue you a 30 day evaluation license for your prospects if the deal is properly registered.
We can renew this license if your customer needs more time.
Upon the second request for renewal (the 3rd license), we will assist you with a managed evaluation, where goals are set for the customer to meet, and one of our Solutions Architects will work with you and the prospect to bring them to completion before the 3rd evaluation expires.

Marketing

GitLab will strive to support you in your marketing efforts. Marketing activities should be focused on GitLab EE, and will usually fall into 1 of 3 categories:

Event Funds Requests

We would like to sponsor events related to issues and solutions that GitLab users face every day, such as DevOps, open source and collaboration. Meetups, drink ups, hackathons, trade shows, and seminars are all examples of events that we may help you with. Leads gathered at an event that we help fund or promote are required to be shared with us. These leads will be assigned to you in SalesForce.

We will endeavor to provide funds to support up one event per reseller per quarter. We may also be able to provide speakers, promote your event, provide swag, and/or artwork for an event. Please note that a request does not mean that funds will automatically be allocated. We need to see value in an event to provide support. Please submit the request for event sponsorship no later than one month before the date of the event.

If request for sponsorship is accepted, you will be asked to provide photos of the event, participate in a blog post writing about your of the event, and provide a summary of the number of opportunities/leads gained.

Please submit your application for event support here and chose the reseller template.

Please submit your application for event support in a new issue in the reseller page of gitlab.com. When it allows you to select a template, choose the reseller template and fill in responses to the categories. All the relevant GitLab parties will be notified once you submit your issue and will be in touch shortly. You will be able to track the progress of your submission in the issue.

Online Marketing Support Requests

GitLab may, at our discretion, also assist you with your advertising campaigns by providing online marketing support in your region. When requesting assistance, be as complete as you can in describing what you need, who the audience is, channels, and the expected ROI. Please apply here and chose the reseller template.

Swag Requests

Please submit your application for GitLab branded swag here We have been known to co-fund co-branded or locally produced SWAG. Send submit your idea here and chose the reseller template.

Technical Support

While we do not require them to, we do expect that your customers will, for the most part, contact you if they need help. It is in both of our best interest that they do so, as the more touch points you have with them, the more likely you are to further develop business with them. We do not expect you to be as knowledgeable about our products as our own support staff, and do expect that you will need to escalate some issues to our support staff. To facilitate this, you will be assigned a Dedicated Support Engineer (DSE) to help your staff troubleshoot and resolve any issues that your customers may encounter. Your contact at GitLab can use the Dedicated Support Engineer issue template to start the process of finding a suitable DSE. We will make every attempt to assign you a DSE that is in your time zone and if possible, having appropriate language skills.

You may contact your DSE at the email address in the README file of the resellers project. This address is only for post-sales technical support. For pre-sales technical issues, please contact your local GitLab sales team.

Due to vacations, holidays, etc., sometimes your DSE will not be available, or they may need to involve others at GitLab. For this reason, all correspondence should be in English as that is the language in common for our support staff worldwide.

When contacting your DSE, you will need to include the following for each incident:

Name and email address of the end user reporting the problem, their GitLab.com user ID (if they have one), and their company name.
What EE version they are using
Salient details about their setup
First date of issue occurrence
Any related open bug reports, feature requests, etc. on the gitlab-ce or gitlab-ee issue trackers

Do not escalate GitLab.com or GitLab CE incidents to your DSE; instead please refer them to the normal support channels.

GitLab Landing Page guidelines

Your website will need to have a landing page with information about GitLab. You can see what others have done from the Resellers page.

We would prefer your landing page to be at yoururl.com/GitLab where this is not possible, we would ask you to set a redirect for that URL to the actual one.
We highly encourage your landing page to be in local language. There are plenty of English language resources on GitLab, so providing them in the native tounge of your customers adds value.
You should use our Authorized Reseller Logo on your page, and have it link back to us at https://about.gitlab.com/resellers
There needs to be a “What is GitLab?” paragraph
Where ever you mention a GitLab product or feature, there should be a link back to our corresponding item on https://about.gitlab.com

Here is also a list of resources that you may find useful to include on your landing page.

Authorized Reseller Logos

The GitLab Authorized reseller logo should help tell your prospects and customers that we are working with you.

You should use our Authorized Reseller Logo on your materials where appropriate and in accordance with our brand guidelines.

The logos are available in the README file of the resellers project.

Slack

All authorised gitlab resellers will be invited to the GitLab #resellers slack channel. This is a channel for you to reach our sales and marketing team, as well other resellers.