Channel Management Blog
Our blog features channel management tips, best practices and expert insights to help you get the most out of your PRM and create a successful partner program.
Feeding Your Channel Partners High Quality Leads
For most things, you get out of them what you put into them. The channel is no different, but too often vendors enter the channel to reduce internal head counts and cut costs, with the idea that the channel is a launch-it-and-forget-it kind of thing.
Deal Registration Best Practices
The overarching best practice in deal registration is to design your process with partners’ interests in mind, and they’ll register deals without too much prompting from you. If a partner’s relationship with your company and product is serving them, they’ll register deals.
Determining the ROI of Your Channel
Everyone is looking to get an ROI read on their indirect sales channel, especially those organizations that are just starting out with a partner program. If you’ve been tasked with managing this initiative, odds are your CEO is regularly asking, “what are we getting out of the channel?” This is true especially for CEOs who […]
What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You
Lack of visibility into the channel is one of the most common contributors to a failed indirect sales initiative. There’s no way around it: you can’t manage in the dark, and you can’t build effective strategy on guesswork. When management lacks easy access to channel data—visibility into partners’ profiles, recruitment pipeline and partner performance, geographic […]
Structuring a Partner Program to Get the Partner Behaviors You Want Part 1
If you’ve ever had a spiff program not work the way you’d hoped, you already know that partners can behave in completely unexpected ways… Or are they really that unexpected? With a little forethought, if you consider what an incentive program is actually enticing, you will see pretty quickly that the partners’ behavior is completely […]
The Channel as Search Engine Optimizer
Five Steps for Dominating SEO Using Your Channel Lets face it: The reason you build a reseller channel is to accelerate your company’s sales ten times faster than you could by building a direct sales force. Historically, Partner Relationship Management has focused on providing static marketing materials, funds for marketing campaigns, and distribution of leads […]
The Truth about the Magic Hockey Stick
It looks so nice on the channel partner revenue graph — a line inclines gradually for a year or so, and then makes a sharp upward turn, the shape of a hockey stick. Everyone thinks their indirect sales program is different, that wild success is inevitable—just get some partners and launch. But the fact is, […]