EXORCISING THE 3 GHOSTS THAT HAUNT MOST CHANNEL MANAGERS
If you are like most channel managers then you are probably haunted by some channel management ghosts that keep you up at night. They manifest in the form of foggy channel partner activity view, zombie-like channel partner engagement levels and the inability to find the silver bullet that will help you become your channel partner’s favorite brand. This week’s blog talks about how you can get rid of these spooks.
Let’s talk about the first spook–Foggy partner view. You know who your channel partners are and also the top 5 or 7 of them. But, your knowledge in this sphere ends just about there. You don’t know exactly what marketing or sales activities they are engaging in or what market strategies they are adopting or what their USP is, which is causing them to fit into the top bracket. You also don’t know which channel partners are performing poorly and are probably just eating away your channel marketing budget with zero results. You know you would do so much better if only you knew the answers to those questions.
The second scare—channel partner engagement index that seems to be as sluggishly slow as a zombie. You have given your channel partners the training they need to be effective at selling your products, but, you just don’t seem to be able to see them putting that into action. You share training materials and new product/service updates with them occasionally, but you rarely find them engaging with you proactively. You know high channel engagement levels are important as they help your channel partners understand your vision and offering better, but you are not sure as to how can you increase their interaction and engagement with you.
The third thing that goes bump in the night—the fear that you are not your channel partner’s preferred vendor. When you are competing with multiple vendors to gain your channel partner’s attention, how do you ensure that you top the list of preferred vendors? What can you do so that your product/service is pushed as much as you’d like?
Channel enablement can be your answer to all the three challenges discussed above. A good channel enablement platform will:
Provide you with 360-degree view of your channel partner’s activities. That means you get to see exactly how your MDF funds were used, what marketing/sales activities your channel partners engaged in and the results. You get to see exactly how many leads were registered by them and how many of them were converted.
Take the subjectivity out of measuring your channel partner’s engagement levels and performance. You can measure your channel partner’s engagement levels by keeping track of what training materials they downloaded, which certification programs they signed up and completed and which product/service updates were read.
Give your channel partners access to amazing tools that will help them sell more. Channel enablement involves making it easy for your channel partners to sell your products/services. Channel sales playbooks, personalized sales and marketing assets with easy and on-the-go access to them, localized marketing and sales campaigns—are all ways into your channel partner’s heart.
So, this Halloween, spook the spook out of your channel sales model with channel enablement!
