Black Box 10x’s Customer-Driven Pipeline With Channeltivity
"Channeltivity just makes us more nimble, respond quicker, and receive requests right away. Before, it would take 24 hours for partners to get a response. Now, our internal sales reps are managing communications in 4 hours or less."
About Black Box
Black Box (BSE: 500463/NSE: BBOX) is a global leader in digital infrastructure solutions, delivering network and system integration, managed services, and technology products to Fortune 100 and top global enterprises. With a presence across the United States, Europe, India, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America, Black Box serves businesses across financial services, technology, healthcare, retail, public services, and manufacturing.
Supported by a global team of around 3,600 professionals and strategic partnerships with leading technology providers, Black Box delivers end-to-end solutions in network integration, digital connectivity infrastructure, data center buildouts, modern workplace solutions, and cybersecurity. Its technology products portfolio enhances business operations with cutting-edge solutions in AV, IoT, KVM, networking, infrastructure, and cables.
The Problem: A Series of Clunky Processes
Before Channeltivity, deal registration at Black Box was a multi-step process. Partners had to:
- Request a registration worksheet from their partner manager
- Download a PDF, fill it out, and email it back
- Follow up via email for status updates
On the internal side, partner managers spent hours reviewing submissions, manually entering deals into Salesforce, and tracking each one through to close.
“It was very antiquated,” said David Isola, Director of Product Marketing at Black Box. “There was a lot of human interaction that really didn’t need to be there.”
But it wasn’t just deal registration slowing the team down. Even simple partner asks — like requesting a pricing sheet or co-branded presentation — meant Black Box partner managers were digging through inboxes or chasing the marketing team for assets.
That back and forth began to add up, bogging down David’s team and hindering the partner sales cycle.
The Search For a Solution
David and his team began looking for a way to streamline their program and eliminate administrative burden. But most of the PRM platforms they came across were expensive, rigid, or both.
“We needed something cost-effective and easy to configure. I wanted to be able to build and manage it myself without much technical lift or dependency on IT,” he says.
Seeing how easy it was to set up and configure Channeltivity — and the enterprise scale it could handle — sealed the deal.
“The control you have over Channeltivity’s back-end and its ease of use is what really stands out. I like the interface and the way I can make changes and build out our modules and reporting in real time. It’s very intuitive.” – David Isola, Director of Product Marketing at Black Box
Channeltivity: A Cloud-Based Portal Partners Actually Want to Use
Just months into launching Channeltivity, Black Box saw a dramatic shift.
Black Box’s partners could finally submit deals through an intuitive portal. Internal reps could manage the pipeline directly in Channeltivity — and in Salesforce, using our platform’s two-way CRM sync and managed package.
Making it easy for partners to log and track their deal registrations paid dividends for Black Box.
“After making the switch to an easier deal registration process in the portal, we increased our customer-driven pipeline by 10x,” David says.
“Channeltivity just makes us more nimble, respond quicker, and receive requests right away. Before, it would take 24 hours for partners to get a response. Now, our internal sales reps are managing communications in 4 hours or less,” he adds.
That’s an 83% decrease in time to response.
Channeltivity has also become a go-to hub for internal sales enablement. While partner access to the Library and Co-Branded Collateral is coming soon, David has already rolled out those modules to the sales team.
“We’re currently using Channeltivity as a pre-sales internal CMS for our reps so that presentations, brochures, data sheets, they’re now all in one place,” David says.
“As a result, I’ve noticed that our sales team isn’t asking, ‘Do you have this? Do you have that?’ all the time.”
When David and his team are ready, Channeltivity’s customizable permissions will make it easy to show the right content to the right partners, getting partners up to speed faster and helping Black Box see which partners are actually using the portal.
David points out, “Seeing what content our partners are pulling from the Library will tell us a lot — what’s popular, what’s not getting used, and what we should stop spending time creating.”
What’s Next
Along with rolling out marketing and training content to partners, Black Box has plans to activate Channeltivity’s multi-language module to better support partners in Germany, Spain, and France.
They’re also rolling out internal training to drive adoption in EMEA, where deal registration isn’t yet standard practice. “With Channeltivity, we’re laying the foundation for an even more robust global partner strategy,” David emphasizes.
If you’re struggling with a highly manual process or your PRM isn’t as flexible as you’d like it to be, consider Channeltivity.
Our enterprise-ready platform is fast to implement, easy to customize, fully integrated with your CRM, and is SOC 2 Type II certified.
Want to see Channeltivity in action? Schedule a demo to see how it can level up your program.