Lauren Robinette, Channel Rockstar

Who

Lauren Robinette is an accomplished partner channel business development professional in high tech companies like HP, Avaya, Symantec, Cisco, Postini, Samsung, Xangati and her own start up.

Lauren was recently named in Channel Reseller News (CRN) as one of the top 2015 Channel Chiefs, and a 2014 Women of the Channel.

Business Challenge

Quickly build an enterprise partner channel from scratch that is able to manage partners on a global scale at Samsung and Xangati.

Solution

• Channeltivity
• Channeltivity Salesforce Edition

At Samsung, Lauren was entrusted to build an enterprise partner channel, where previously all sales had been direct to consumer through telcos and direct storefronts. She had the challenge of changing the partner mindset and process from one of fulfillment to sales participation, which meant different partners.

One of the biggest obstacles Lauren faced was the need to manage the contract process globally. Working with Channeltivity, she helped develop the ‘Click to contract’ functionality now available to all Channeltivity customers. With it, she was able to accept 65 distinct contracts globally without having to go through the back and forth of a contract’s red line process.

“Channeltivity enabled us to streamline an often long and cumbersome process so partners could quickly sign our contract and get to selling, no matter where they were around the globe. Because of Channeltivity, we were able to sign up 250 global partners within 6 months.”

At Xangati, the challenge was similar. Lauren explains, “when I went to Xangati and had to once again create a global enterprise channel program, selecting Channeltivity was the natural choice. I was able to integrate Channeltivity to Salesforce and sign partners globally without anyone but myself as operations, outbound marketing and recruiter, with the support of field reps bringing me into partner meetings.”

Here she was able to implement Channeltivity in under 2 weeks, and load all the partner marketing and sales content to their Channeltivity-driven partner portal in a weekend.

Another important benefit to Lauren was the ease of deal registration. Before Channeltivity, sales reps at Xangati had to load the deals into Salesforce manually. After Channeltivity, partners were able to quickly register their own deals. “Partners were able to tell us about a deal, rather than us telling them about a deal. It revealed many registered deals that we wouldn’t have otherwise known about,” said Lauren.

For both organizations, the partner portal made it easy for partners to access the channel marketing materials they needed, where previously they had been in shared drives that were difficult to get to and download.

“In addition to the software, Channeltivity’s team is responsive and easy to do business with. The flexibility and speed of development was very beneficial to the success of these channel programs.”