Baptie Online

How do you make CRM work for you as Channel Reseller?

Ian Moyse — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:36:00 GMT

By Ian Moyse, Workbooks.com Sales Director, Eurocloud UK Board Member and Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member

‘The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.’ Peter Drucker

For any organisation that resells products or services it’s important to maximise your gross margins and ensure cash flow is healthy, particularly in today’s competitive market. At the same time however, you need to deliver the highest quality service possible to your customers at the lowest cost to your business whilst differentiating yourselves in a positive manner. Get this mix right and you have a highly successful company with happy clients, growing sales, healthy profits and happy staff that are able to take customer development and loyalty to a whole new level. In this competitive world, hanging onto customers is critical and a key factor is recognising that intelligence about the customer and how to leverage it is king. Being able to make the right, timely decisions about new business ventures, promotions, campaigns and sales focus are only possible when ‘quick-to-access’ and detailed insight into your business metrics are available. CRM ‘done right’ can transform your performance and play a vital role in successful and profitable revenue generation.

So how can you really make CRM work for you as a reseller?

Marketing that works

As a reseller you need your marketing spend to meet some key criteria;

1. Help you sell new products to existing customers

2. Find new customers

3. Allow you to report back to a vendor on the outcome of a funded activity

4. Provide you ammunition to leverage more marketing funds and support from your vendors

However it’s notoriously difficult to understand if your new sales really resulted from marketing or from some other route. Creative marketing campaigns are great, but you need to get the fundamental marketing processes in place to ensure your marketing investment pays off and is delivering a clear and measurable return on investment.

Let’s examine how a well implemented CRM platform can help you quantify your marketing spend and results, in a simple and manageable fashion.

Lead capture & rating

‘80% of tradeshow leads are never followed up.’ Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR)

‘40% of qualified telemarketing leads only have marginal follow-up: 50% are never called’ LeadMaster

You spent good money on your website and you might also be investing in PPC (Pay Per Click) and Search Engine Optimisation. You might (if you are lucky) also get the odd lead from a vendor, and don’t forget the trade shows you attend.

It is essential that you make sure all leads are captured in the CRM solution and then followed-up promptly. You can automatically populate leads directly from your website into your CRM system and if implemented correctly you can capture how the visitor found you. Did they find you via PPC or a search engine? and which key words did they enter? Capturing this type of information

gives the sales team context when they follow-up, providing a more personalised and informed approach. This enables you to easily measure and rate different lead sources against each other, therefore allowing you to amend your marketing spend accordingly to ensure maximum ROI on future campaigns.

Help your sales team by rating the leads so they can prioritise which ones to follow-up. A good CRM platform can help with this, by allowing you to sort and group your leads.

Don’t distribute leads by email, they will get lost amongst the hundreds of other emails sales people are inundated with and you can’t track or report on the outcomes. Use predefined rules to assign leads in your CRM automatically and create dashboards so your sales team can see, in real time, exactly what they need to action.

Robust lead-follow-up

‘Organizations with a structured lead nurturing process average & maintain the highest ROI on their sales leads : 163% ROI vs an industry average of 35%.’

Source : Marketing Sherpe 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey

It’s a common disagreement amongst Sales & Marketing; marketing do not provide enough leads, and sales do not follow up on them well enough. Use your CRM solution to provide clarity and hold your sales team accountable. Create reports and dashboards which show which leads haven’t been called, or which leads don’t have follow-up activities scheduled. Remember that delivering clear, relevant information to someone in a simple to understand manner prompts action.

If your sales team qualify-out of a lead, make it easy to record ‘why?’ in the CRM platform, so you can understand which types & sources of leads deliver real results. For instance, what if you knew that 10% of all lost deals could be recovered through management intervention, using more experience and oversight of the sales teams actions and decisions? What would this be worth to your business?

Ensure your CRM system enables you to track details of all customer order history and which people were involved in previous sales. This will allow you to quickly and easily create targeted marketing campaigns to existing customers when you want to update them on product enhancements or remind them of upcoming renewals.

Order management made easy

You’ve won the deal, now you need to buy the goods from your suppliers and deliver against your customers’ expectations. A good CRM system can make this easy, streamlining your processes and giving you the management data you need.

Use your CRM system to create and track Sales Orders, including cost and sale prices. Convert your sales orders into Supplier Purchase Orders and store these alongside the supplier details. When you are ready to bill, convert your Order into an Invoice again inside the CRM platform, ensuring all data is consistent, automatic and recorded inline with other customer details.

Need to part ship an order or record special pricing on a deal? Maybe you need to track warrantee information or serial numbers for support purposes. Again all this can be stored in the CRM system.

Most organisations use spread sheets for this part of the business process. But spread sheets are prone to manual error, are difficult to share across multiple people and don’t provide the management reporting really needed. They also introduce the syndrome of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. If I couldn’t see some details stored on some spreadsheet and wasn’t aware of them how can I act and behave in the correct manner?

A well implemented CRM system, enables business leaders to track key metrics such as:

• New bookings in a given week / month

• New billings in a given week / month

• What’s left to ship this month?

• What’s our gross margin going to be?

It further enables sales people to track their orders as they are being fulfilled to make sure your customer’s expectations are being reached. In addition it should provide the right tools for the order processing teams to make their job easy.

Contract renewals

‘Increasing customer retention by just 5 % can increase profits by 25 % to 95 %.’ Bain & Company

Renewal revenues are increasingly important to businesses that resell. With competition for new business so strong, retaining existing customer revenues is critical. Support contracts, subscription licenses or warrantee agreements all need renewing on a regular basis.

Storing this data in your CRM system where you can easily report and track renewals makes managing this process more effective and increases visibility of any negatives or trends before they have a surprise impact.

Implemented well, you can automate much of the process around renewals, including sending email reminders to the relevant contacts or even automating the delivery of renewal orders for customers to sign.

Support Contracts stored in your CRM system are also accessible to your support teams. So when customers are calling in for help, you can ensure they are under contract and entitled to that support and you are therefore not missing a revenue opportunity.

Delightful customer support

Your customers buy from you because of your expertise and product knowledge and this extends to ongoing support.

You want to delight your customers with exceptional support and you want your support team to be cost effective. Support is an area that done well can increase your renewals and customer receptiveness to do more business with you. However if you slip up, you often find sales reps, and others, dragged back

onto deals already closed, reducing the opportunity for more business and what seemed a profitable and reference-able customer can be quickly lost.

Your CRM platform should be at the heart of your Helpdesk. It should be easy for your customers to raise support calls, automatically turning emails into support cases and enabling your customers to log support tickets directly from your website. Transaction history will also help your team understand if they are dealing with one of your major accounts, so they can go the extra mile to delight your biggest customers.

If you are committed to responding to your customers within a specific period make sure your CRM system makes it easy to check you are hitting your targets. Use data from your support cases to find new opportunities, for instance if a customer is logging a lot of support calls, consider up-selling them a training course or some additional consultancy. Of course it also enables your sales team to see the full 360 of the customer and know of a support issue as they make that all important customer call.

Show me the money

Cash is king, every small (and even large) business owner knows this is true. Yet for most organisations cash collection and chasing aged debts is seen as the responsibility of the finance department.

However, finance departments often have no first-hand knowledge of your customer, they haven’t met the people paying the bills and they weren’t involved in negotiating the deal. They also have no visibility of any support or project issues which would indicate why a customer isn’t making payment.

CRM systems aren’t just for sales folks, get your finance team involved and use the CRM system to track down payment. At the very least they can see which people at the customer were involved in the purchase and who can sign-off payment.

Financials remain in the finance system, but a simple connection between the two is all it requires to deliver some powerful benefits to all concerned, not least the customer and your bottom line.

Used effectively your CRM system can join-up sales, order processing and finance. Enabling you to streamline your business process and move from prospect to cash much more quickly.

Love your vendor

Not only do your vendors expect you to make sales, but they also want visibility of your sales pipeline and forecasts on a regular basis. Being tied to one vendor can be bad enough, but when you have multiple vendors on your back it can become a job in itself to keep track of the information they expect, and often requires your input or a Market Development Funds program.

If you set your system up correctly, it should be easy for you to create reports for your vendors. It then becomes essential to ensure that your CRM solution has the ability to categorise opportunities and orders by product vendor. Ideally, this should be done at a line item level, so when you are selling multiple products to a customer, you

can extract the relevant information without having to share all of the opportunity data with each participating vendor.

Are you agreeing special pricing on a deal? Make sure the costs prices are correctly reflected on the opportunity and attach the vendor’s email authorisation to the record, so when you convert the opportunity into an order on the CRM system, all the correct cost prices are in place and you have an audit trail just in case you need it.

Are you selling lots of one particular product? Maybe it’s time to renegotiate the discount you’re getting from the vendor / distributor, or your credit terms with the supplier. Create dashboards in the system so you can quickly and easily see the volume of business you’re doing by product vendor and distributor at any given time.

Being a reseller is not just about the customer downstream, but also, critically, how you manage your supplier and vendor relationships upstream, and tie the two ends together. Understanding how to manage, measure and leverage these are key in today’s competitive reseller landscape.

Understanding, and being able to use the data to negotiate well with your supplier in terms of marketing funds, campaigns, resource investment and lead flow over that of other competing resellers can be a strong USP for your business.

5 Videos from Channel Focus North America and Latin America

Jon Whitlock — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Last week, I attended the Channel Focus North America and Latin America Conference in San Diego, CA and enjoyed engaging in a number of conversations and sessions with other channel executives. Lots of great topics were discussed, including these few that I particularly enjoyed:

The vendors role in helping partners migrate their businesses to the cloud, its economics, and how distributors can play a role in supporting you and your partners in this effort. It's clear that we need to help partners move towards a business value selling model and acquire or develop the skills needed to sell to functional departments beyond IT -- like marketing and sales -- where technology buying decisions are increasingly being made.
Partner compensation and engagement models were also hot topics with discussions on helping align the partners' objectives with yours and the need to engage with them so you can incorporate their feedback and understand what is important to them for the success of your program.
How to make your partners lives easier, including having an effective onboarding program with a prescriptive roadmap based on partner certifications and capabilities. Recommendations included online self-service enablement platforms with engaging content that is easy for partners to access; ensuring channel account teams are aligned and capable of driving onboarding objectives; and providing a clear path from partner orientation to driving demand and selling.
How To Use Social Media in the Channel was a session where the presenter discussed how 75% of their partners watch job-related videos like how to install product, and how they are using social media to “Educate, Engage, and Empower” their partners.

Check out the videos of several presenters at the conference, where they provide an overview of what they discussed and shared with other attendees.

BJ Schaknowski, CA Technologies, Vice President North America Partner Sales delivered the Keynote presentation, “Adapting to your Partners Ever-Changing Business Models, How the Cloud will Change the Partner-Vendor Paradigm”

View this presentation in a separate window.

Jon Roskill, Microsoft, Vice President Worldwide Partner Group delivered the keynote on Day 2 titled “The State of the Channel – An Analysis of the Key Changes in the Channel and How Partners are Responding"

View this presentation in a separate window.

Bill Griffin, Autodesk, VP Global Channels finished up the conference with an engaging session on “Beyond the Transaction – How do You Reward Partners for the Value they Really Bring”

View this presentation in a separate window.

Tom Flink, Citrix Systems, Vice President Channels and Market Development presented “Channel Analytics – Just what should You be Measuring and How do You Utilize the Results to Improve Channel Performance”

View this presentation in a separate window.

Steve Hale, former Channel Chief at Sophos and Managing Director of ZenLion Consulting, presented “Making Your Partners Lives Easier – Five Key Things you can do to Make Your Company Easier to do Business With”

View this presentation in a separate window.

Please share your thoughts and comments on any of these topics and I hope to see you at next year’s conference.

Working Magic in the Channel

Tracy Delphia — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:13:00 GMT

The first day of Channel Focus North America with Channel Focus Latin America has concluded and it was a very full day of insightful presentations and workshops. Baptie &Company arranged some surprise entertainment during dinner this evening: a table-side magician. The magic act was an apropos choice to conclude the day given that many of the discussions revolved around business transformation which is shaping up to be a bit of “sleight of hand” for many in the channel. No one doubts that the channel and business models are changing. Channel vendors are hoping to transform their businesses and those of their partner ecosystems as effortlessly as the magician tonight transformed cards from one suit to another in front of our eyes. Both “tricks” – those of the magician and those of the channel – require practice and dedication to perfect. But unlike the magician carefully guarding his secrets, delegates at Channel Focus have been sharing information and insights to help the entire channel community grow.

Tomorrow is another full day of sharing and learning beginning with a breakfast keynote presentation on The State of the Channel. I’ll be shuffling through my deck of notes next week and while I may not pull a rabbit out of my hat, I hope to share some insights with you. Follow our hashtag #CFNA12 on Twitter for more updates from the conference.

Treat Your Company-level Incentives like a Loyalty Rewards Program

Vaughn Aust — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:27:00 GMT

You’ve probably got a wallet full of rewards cards tracking points for your favorite coffee, clothing, book purchases and more. The concept of offering rewards in exchange for business isn’t new. But most manufacturers have failed to make the leap in logic that running a loyalty program (rewards to individuals) is not all that different from running a company-level incentives program.

The reality is that the goals of individual and company level incentives programs are similar enough to consider an integrated approach. In a business-to-business relationship your incentives programs are both structured to drive incremental channel revenue and profit, speed new product adoption with your partners, help in establishing competitive differentiation, increase partner loyalty and “share of wallet,” and ultimately, strengthen your relationship with your channel partners.

The most obvious benefit of an integrated approach is the overall cost-effectiveness achieved as a result of increased efficiency in programmatic operation, particularly with streamlined administrative needs. An integrated approach also enables you to align global strategy across multiple regions while still allowing for local implementation. With a single global strategy in place however, it is possible to unify disparate audiences toward common goals.

My favorite approach – and benefit – of an integrated approach however is the ability to take advantage of a single, common points-based currency across your incentive programs. Programs that are points-based enable spending on non-cash rewards. While “cash is king” for many channel partners, there are non-cash rewards that many organizations find useful, including:

Pre-packaged marketing plays
Demo units
Training and certification
Marketing support, and
Travel and gas vouchers

Cash has limited value promoting loyalty at the company level. For example, it isn’t always used to promote your products over those of a competitor. And normally, cash is used to pay for operations costs, not in generating more demand for you products and solutions. The bottom line is that cash – and the source of it – is often forgotten after the money is spent.

Non-cash programs at the company level target your “incentives” budget at promoting your products and solutions. Partners use the dollars to generate more demand – for your offerings. Non-cash rewards also motivate specific company behavior and help you establish a unique, competitive advantage. The spend of points-based company level incentives enables ongoing ROI measurement and insight that is completely lost when you pay out cash incentives. And finally, by integrating a points-based, company-level incentive program with a points-based, loyalty rewards program, you vastly improve administrative efficiency.

A single points-based incentives program – one that combines your individual rewards program with your company-level incentives program – offers unparalleled benefits to both manufacturer and partner.

Seasonal Shopping Trends Have Growing Influence on Global Economy

Chad Gray — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:39:00 GMT

Did you know that Chinese New Year has grown into a 5-day national holiday during which shopping is heavily encouraged in China? With the global nature of the economy and increasing internet sales, once-regional seasonal holidays now have a growing impact on the global sales channel. For example, in the two weeks before Chinese New Year, the TCI Index for China rose 17% increase in 2010, 47% in 2011, and 56% in 2012. China’s Fall Golden Week (Oct 1st – 7th) is quickly becoming another important 5-day shopping holiday centered around National Day.

There are many other seasonal trends to consider when planning inventory and forecasting sales:

– Back-to-school shopping is now a major online sales event. During the 2011 season, online sales grew by 34% while traditional electronics specialty retailer sales fell by 12%. And the online sales growth during this season has been steadily creeping up every year.

– Europe sees a significant decrease in sales activity during the summer holidays. Tech Channel Index data shows that regional sales activity for the May-July period typically drops from 14-19% compared to January-April activity across Europe.

Visit the TCI Momentum Index for an up-to-date weekly history of channel sales volume globally or regionally. Additionally, get ongoing channel updates by following Zyme Solutions on Twitter.

Whats in store for Q2?

Estelle Johannes — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:35:00 GMT

Lots going on and lots to do, so this should be a nice bite size bit of information that you can really sink your teeth into.

But before I do that – I would like to congratulate the channel team, thank the members for attending and thank our sponsors for a very successful and enjoyable Channel Focus UK event. We had our 2 day event at the lovely Celtic Manor in Wales with an awesome line up of speakers and a jam packed agenda.

Sessions that were very popular at the UK event were:

A View from Outside the Industry - A Key Company Outside the Industry Share the Elements that make a real Difference to Their Partner Strategy?
Building a Market & Channel Strategy for the Cloud
How Can You Build the Right Economies of Scale to Effectively sell to the SMB market?
Joint Campaign Planning How do You Make it Effective for You and Your Partners?
Making Your Partners Lives Easier! Five Key Things You can Do to Make Your Company Easier to Do Business with

Some of the sessions from this event will be produced into fresh whitepapers and vibrant webinars, so keep an eye out for the latest updates from the community.

What are the other burning issues you would like us to address in the community - if you ask the question, we will try and get you the answer!

We have 2 virtual events coming up soon – so don’t forget to register. WEBINAR: What Does It Take For A Reseller To Migrate To The Cloud? Twitter #cfwgwe and WEBINAR: Boosting Partner Sales Performance: Aligning Enablement with Demand Generation Twitter #cfweb12

We are also very excited about the Channel Focus North America with Channel Focus Latin America 2012 Event coming up on the 26 and 27 of April. Follow the latest updates on twitter #CFNA2012

Did you get to see our latest recorded webinar : Paths to the Cloud: Cloud Computing and the New Channel Engagement Model? there is also an accompanying whitepaper to download.

The channel focus events are amazing to go to, and to top it off the energy and willingness to participate on the channel community website gets a fabulous surge…so its full steam ahead and lots to do keeping my channel focus community helpers real busy.

If you want to join in and play an active part in the community – would you like to be a blogger, become a speaker or just want to start a discussion with your peers send me an email on ejohannes@baptie.com or call me on +44 (0) 207 250 0100 to see how you can get involved.

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." BILL GATES

Channels Employing Cloud

Ian Moyse — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:26:00 GMT

By Ian Moyse, Workbooks.com Sales Director, Eurocloud UK Board Member and Cloud Industry Forum Governance Board Member

2012 is rumored as the tipping point for cloud. For the last four to five years, we have heard that cloud (Internet-delivered solutions) is about to go mainstream, however, this year it is not the hype, but real user benefits that are driving adoption

What do I mean by this. Well people are not going out looking for cloud-based solutions (“I want some cloud”), instead they are looking for a solution to a real problem. Some users are unknowingly using a cloud-based solution (either in their business or personal lives) and are quickly seeing the benefits. Take for example Dropbox, a free tool for sharing (large) files across devices seamlessly, easily and from anywhere, where users adopt it from a need that it solves and not because of the technology factor behind it or because of any cloud hype.

Cloud computing is expected to enjoy an adoption rate and growth of between 30 to 40 percent per year, every year for the next five years and its promise of substantial benefits will drive this adoption. . A 2012 customer study from Rise indicating that 94% of IT departments expect to expand their use of cloud in the next 12 months.

The whole cloud evolution has stirred up a large discussion in all spheres of the channel, unfortunately usually focused on the concerns rather than the opportunity – these ranging from where does distribution fit through to how do I transfer an up-front revenue model to an annuity based model whilst keeping cashflow alive and kicking.

Questions I have heard from the reseller channel across events, meetings and roundtables over the past 12 months are wide and varied, however a key group of questions and concerns come up again and again focusing around ;

• “Vendors will sell it direct”

• “Where’s the services revenue for me as a reseller?”

• “There’s no differentiator for us as a reseller”

• “The margins are too low”

• “Customers can buy it online, why should we resell it?”

• “Why should I sell monthly billing cloud when with products I get paid up front?”

• “How do I fund the transition period to get from lump-sum to over time billing?”

• “I don’t want my existing customers switching to cheaper cloud solutions!”

• “I want to bill my customer, not have the vendor do it!”

We still hear the downers on cloud even from an end user adoption scenario – the news stories of gloom, fear and disdain. It was not so long ago that Internet shopping was placed in the same bucket, and yet this has become the norm and is continuing to enjoy compound growth and affect the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail arena.

There is plenty of hype on the ‘cloud’ and certainly plenty of discussion and content, and yet reports and audiences still show a need for education on the terms, benefits and realities of this growing form factor. Top concerns of businesses in survey after survey on the cloud, continue to be security, data sovereignty and reliability. In a recent end user study from the Cloud Industry Forum 62% of companies using or planning to use cloud indicated Data Security was their prime concern. When it comes to individuals the top concern in the IT arena is job loss and reduction of individual value.

In my experience with the channel there is a lack of knowledge of cloud solutions, terminology and how to relate them to solving customer problems. In a webinar I ran in March I held a survey of the audience asking who could confidently explain the following to a prospective client : PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, Private, Public, Hybrid Cloud. And not one attendee voted yes confidently they could! In fact the weight was behind the lower end of I couldn’t explain it well at all!

If this is the case in the channel and surveys and reports from end users show they are lacking the knowledge then there is a strong opportunity for the channel to up their game, educate, understand and bring value to clients in a consultative manner. To be the ‘trusted advisors’ who can understand the customer’s business pain and objectives and help match cloud based propositions to those, guiding, handholding, configuring and securing the customers cloud steps along the way. With this comes margin, differentiation and customer value.

So with this growth and opportunity of cloud comes a change in skill requirements and job opportunities. One of CRN’s top 10 cloud predictions for 2012 is a growth in demand for cloud jobs as validated by an article in CIO magazine in early 2012. Cloud computing is and will have a major impact on skills across business, with IT being the most logically effected it will also impose itself onto roles in marketing, support and business roles in general. The demand for cloud-based skills already is showing signs of exploding. A recent report from Wanted Analytics, reported that hiring for cloud computing expertise showed a growth of 61 percent year over year. The cloud market is growing at such a pace that the number of job postings is accelerating and yet the talent qualifying for these roles is marginal.

Cloud offers opportunities for those that embrace the new form factor and self-educate and certify themselves for the needs of employers today and tomorrow. More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology to its advantage. For the channel attaining certifications and education will be key across both technical, sales, marketing and management disciplines to enable effective decisions and activities to take place that bring value to customer engagements.

CompTIA’s Cloud Essentials certification is an example option that enables employees of varying roles to validate their cloud knowledge, take online training and exam condition testing, and differentiate themselves in the competitive job market. John McGlinchey,Vice President, Europe & Middle East, CompTIA commented “We have had a demand from the user market for a training curriculum with testing to support this rapidly growing new form factor. The demand and adoption is outstripping the skill base and it is key that individuals and businesses recognise and address this shortfall, before it becomes a serious issue for all concerned.”

More education is needed in cloud across all sectors to enable businesses to understand and utilize this important new technology option to its advantage and this need for understanding stretches past simply the border of the IT department. Expect to see more cloud courses and exams providing the market with the required validations in this new cloudy world. Ignoring cloud is no longer an option, utilizing it to your advantage is!

Is Your Content Designed for Lead Engagement?

Jon Whitlock — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:04:00 GMT

In a recent webinar, sales thought leader Brian Carroll took an in-depth look at the topic of lead nurturing. Communicating consistently with potential buyers has become a critical part of the lead qualification process. But of course, not just any type of communication will do if you want to continuously move prospects through the buying cycle.

"We know who the right people are. We know we want to engage them," explains Brian. "The question is, what do we say? And what do we say it with?"

Enter content development, which he described as one of the key steps to effective lead engagement.

These days, a lot of people assume content marketing is geared toward generating inbound leads alone. But for marketers, creating engaging, relevant content is also a valuable tool for nurturing the leads you already have. Content-based lead engagement can also help create more truly qualified opportunities for your partners' sales team (and as we all know, when it comes to defining "qualified leads", partner sales and vendor marketing don't always see eye-to-eye). But perhaps most importantly, Brian pointed to data stating that using content to nurture leads can help to just about double your reps' proposal-to-win ratios.

The question is, how can you design your content library in a way that's most relevant for lead nurturing and engagement? Here are four takeaways from Brian's presentation that can help put you on the right path.

#1. Identify your personas. You already have your database of leads. Who among them are the key decision makers? Who else at the company can influence those decisions? Without first identifying who you're going to be engaging with, you can't develop content that is most relevant to that audience. In other words, leverage the knowledge of your sales reps to find out what those specific people are challenged by, and develop content around those areas.

Brian suggests starting simple by first targeting the person who is driving the buying process (like a CIO). Then, depending on how many contacts you have, you can expand your content strategy to target key influencers as well (IT directors, for example).

#2. Choose the right delivery channels. Once you know who to target, you next need to decide how to target them. As Brain points out, most marketers these days use email as their primary marketing channel, but of course there are a number of others to consider. Blogs, landing pages and microsites are now common tools for engaging with potential customers via search, newsletters, RSS feeds and so on. Event marketing through live webinars or road shows is also an effective ways of using content to connect with buyers.

Of course, different people consume content in different ways. Target the channels that make most sense for your and your partners' specific audience, but don't limit yourself from other opportunities for content delivery.

#3. Leverage your resources - all your resources. Deciding to create content for a target audience is all well and good. But not all marketers have the experience or expertise to know what a specific set of potential buyers needs to hear. As Brian suggests, this is where it's important to leverage the expertise of your partners' sales reps, as they're the ones who have a stronger understanding of the needs of the people they sell to.

He also recommends compiling vendor-agnostic, third-party resources for your partners to share with their prospects, allowing them to become a trusted source of information for their prospects.

#4. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. I already noted how different people react to different types of content. So when you have information or messaging that can be adapted in different formats, it's important to take hold of those opportunities to meet your content demands.

Brian makes a great point about how a research or data sheet could be interpreted for a short video clip, which could also be repurposed as a blog post, which could then be delivered as a personalized email. Creating multiple assets out of one original content item is a great way to get the most impact out of your efforts.

More specifically, Brian gave the example of a typical sales follow-up after a webinar. Instead of just having reps call/email prospects following the event, why not create a content item that breaks down the key takeaways? Better yet, why not create a personalized video message just for them? That way, you arm your partners with content containing information that's actually useful to the people they are talking to, further bolstering that relationship, and nurturing the lead toward the finish line.

So ask yourself again, is your content designed for lead engagement? For more from Brian on the keys to effective lead nurturing, check out the full webinar on-demand, and visit the MECLABS site for even more great info.

Cloud Computing Channel Engagement – Is Your Paradigm Ready?

Tracy Delphia — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:16:00 GMT

Tracy Delphia, Ph.D.

Cloud computing adoption is continuing to see phenomenal growth. But the conversation has shifted gears in 2012 as businesses and their assessment of cloud computing reach a tipping point. The need for cloud computing is evident – and inevitable. But enterprise in particular is now pausing for a restorative catching of the breath as they begin to assess the appropriate use of cloud computing – what activities and data should best be stored in the cloud? What should be kept on premise? Who controls decisions about cloud computing in the organization? Rather than making a mad dash to jump on the Cloud bandwagon, decision makers are now circling the wagons and crafting formal IT plans that address the how, when, and what of cloud computing for their companies.

Likewise, the Channel is also taking a little breather – most probably to lace up our proverbial shoelaces to be ready for the serious marathon race about to ensue. HP’s announcement Tuesday about their reorganization combining the Personal Systems Group (PSG) and Imagining and Printing Group (IPG) is a perfect example of how manufacturers are positioning to consolidate resources and leverage opportunities farther up the stack. Vyomesh Joshi – who is now leaving HP – talked to Partners just last month about the need to move up the stack from hardware to supplies, to services, to solutions. This mirrors movement within the Cloud computing stack as well.

Forrester’s Holger Kisker presented information on Cloud trends and predictions earlier this month in which he discussed the movement within Cloud computing offerings as well. Commoditization is already beginning within cloud computing and we’ll see movement over the next 10-15 years as opportunities for higher margin try to stay ahead of the commodization curve. Forrester predicts the trajectory as moving from Iaas to PaaS to SaaS and finally to Business Processes-as-a-Service as the opportunities move up the stack.

For those of us working in the technology Channel, this means yet another paradigm shift. Vendors and Partners alike are seeking stable ground in the ever shifting sands. Channel revenues are shifting from transactional sales to a recurring revenue model. That means that Vendors need to not only make programmatic adjustments, but they also need to reassess the value of existing partners and target recruitment, coverage and capacity issues; the characteristics of a successful partner today may not pass the Darwinian test as the channel continues to evolve in as short a time as just a year or two from now. Vendors need to consider investing in key partners to help them transition their business – and partners likewise need to commit to vendors willing to make an invesment.

Claudio Ayub and William Gilsing from our Channel Strategy team will be presenting a webinar on March 29th on cloud computing and suggestions for crafting a new cloud services channel engagement model. If you and your channel are struggling with these issues, we hope you’ll join us for the webinar.

We’ve experienced ‘consumerization of IT’ and ‘consumerization of the Enterprise’ but what about consumerization of the channel?

Ian Hutchieson — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 09:51:00 GMT

One thing we all have in common – we’re consumers. And as consumers we behave similarly and share many characteristics. We research online before buying things - like visiting Trip Advisor to check out what others are saying before we book our holiday. We probably then purchase that trip online through an e-commerce website that we have grown to like over the last 12 months.

Most of us participate in social media for work and play and pride ourselves in our publishing skills in our own little way.

Also it’s fair to say that we all seem to have less free time than ever and are less forgiving when we part with our hard earned cash! We expect anytime, anywhere, always-on information, thanks to the one thing that none of us can live without – our mobile phones.

My second bold claim is that most of you reading this article you are, in some way, part of the IT industry – more specifically you have an interest in indirect channels. That’s probably why you’re on this website in the first place. So far so good…

The question then is why tech companies operating channel programs often overlook or dismiss what is right in front of them: the hundreds or thousands of channel partners enrolled in your programs who are also consumers and therefore share a lot of the same habits and values. So, why is that familiarity of the consumer experience forgotten when you try to build a dialogue with your channel?

It is fair to say that when it comes to communicating with channel partners and driving real engagement, most companies are well behind the curve. Forrester does a good job of explaining the breadth of consumerization in the following quote: “At first glance, a vendor strategist might think consumerization is simply about using personal gadgets and online services for work – but it’s more than that. Payment models, self-service, intuitive user interfaces…” (Forrester, 2012). All of these aspects can come into play in a channel program. Who is providing a truly great online experience (that comes anywhere near what a consumer might expect)? Who provides anytime, anywhere communication accessible via a smartphone or tablet? And where’s the fun and creativity?

Channel teams (not just marketing people) need to start thinking of their channel partners as individuals, as consumers – instead of as sales reps or sales engineers, or worse still, treat them all the same.

Start by putting yourself in your reseller’s shoes. See how comfortable they are and then multiply that by 10 or 15 (other vendors trying to do the same thing)! Feeling inspired, motivated? I thought not. This is a great first step, not a comfortable one, but an important one to gain perspective. You’ll have a list of 10 things to change about your program right away.

Ask your partner contacts what they want from you and how they would like to be treated. Chances are you are doing a lot of things right but you’ll also discover 1 or 2 things that might make a big difference if they are changed. If 50% of your base say your MDF and co-marketing is too complicated, then you better give it your attention. If sales reps need to access content on the phone when they’re out with customers, then that might be a good use of your channel budget. Listening to your partners and acting upon their suggestions will go a very long way in building valuable relationships.

Finally, take note of the methods some of the big consumer companies are using to acquire, engage and retain customers, while turning them into real fans. Maybe you are even experiencing these things first-hand outside of the office. One trend that I’ve read about and experienced is gamification (applying techniques used in the gaming world to drive greater engagement with their customers). Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and others are already using it in their B2B marketing but it has great potential for the channel, as well.

Partner programs, like everything else in the world, need to keep up with the times. Thinking like a consumer and leveraging new approaches like gamification can help keep your channel program from feeling stale.Those that keep up, or better still, take the lead will be winners in more ways than one.

New ROI metrics for social media? Achieve amazing social click through or download rates of 8% with socialondemand.

Olivier Choron — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:01:00 GMT

Writing about the ROI of social media and comparing that with email and other direct lead gen techniques… a nice challenge!!! Having put together channel lead gen campaigns for years, I know the downfalls of the spray and pray approach, but somehow I just can’t bring myself to trash it quite so readily. I’ve read many a blog about comparing the two, but the thing is you’re not comparing apples for apples.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the stats of campaigns that come across my desk. Emails are getting an open rate of around 20% (sometimes a lot lower!), with click through rates of about 2-3%. Not bad. Then I see results from socialondemand, our online tool that enables vendors to syndicate their rich content through their channel partners’ social networks. Posts are achieving click through or download rates of nearly 8% (based on the number of the partners’ followers). Maybe time to hit the like button.

It’s not just the post click results that are impressive. It’s the reach as well. 8% of thousands of current followers is much more attractive to a marketer like me than 2% of a few thousand on an ageing email list, purchased a few years ago.

We recently did a tally of the potential audience for socialondemand for one of our clients. We took 22 of their top partners, and added up how many followers they had. Of the 22, only four had no social media presence at all, and the other 18 had over 4.5k followers / connections between them. They are looking to recruit about 100 socially active partners initially, which will give them access to around 25k end-user followers within one click. And that’s a conservative estimate, as we didn’t include followers of individual staff within the partner, just their corporate accounts.

So there are two things that are warming my social cockles compared to direct marketing techniques… reach and currency of contact information. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still worth combining the two, but social media is definitely on my Christmas card list.

Keep your finger on the Channel Focus Pulse

Estelle Johannes — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:11:00 GMT

Speeding through the year like a bullet train, if I blink I might miss Easter!

So much has happened in this short space of time – so a quick recap

We had 2 fantastic webinars so far Show Me The Money! How Good Channel Data Improves Incentive Payments & The 5 Pillars of Systematic Partner Recruitment Campaigns. Looking at the community’s response we have quite a few people out there that are looking for best practices in IT channel recruitment. Our content library contains relevant documents and recordings – go on, have a nose around!

The most recent whitepapers published are Getting the most out of your Channel Marketing Investments and Enabling Partners to Win “White Space” Business.

We are gearing up for our two Channel Focus Events – UK and North America with Latin America. We have a fantastic selection of speakers over 2 days. Thank you to the community for such a great response – The entire Channel Team is keen to meet you all at the events.

If you haven’t registered yet – go to Channel Focus UK or Channel Focus North America with Latin America for the event that is relevant to you. Also don't miss out on our next webinar on 29 March - Paths to the Cloud: How to help your Partners transition to a Cloud services-based business mode. Twitter: #paths2channel

Your know that your ideas are great, so why not let everyone else know – if you are a keen blogger, a captivating speaker or just want to start a discussion with your peers send me an email on ejohannes@baptie.com or call me on +44 (0) 207 250 0100 to see how you can get involved.

Until next time

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

What's Driving Tablet Adoption?

Jon Whitlock — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:23:00 GMT

Recently, our CEO hosted a roundtable series and had the pleasure of meeting with over 70 executives from a cross section of industries (see the chart). These executives shared their experiences, plans, challenges, and advantages gained by using tablets in their businesses. Although the findings we've compiled are not scientific, they provide some insights on how tablets are shaping our business communications strategies. Of the participants who are using tablets, there's a wide variety of usage and adoption, including channel sales.

Trends and factors driving tablet adoption

When asked why their companies are adopting tablets, our participants discussed the following:

Since organizations are now accustomed to smartphone usage among employees, acceptance of tablets may be simpler.
The continuing trend in workshifting - working away from the office and working outside of "normal" business hours - is motivating tablet adoption and acceptance. Workers in this environment are seeking replacements for bulky laptops, and smartphones aren't quite meeting their needs.
With the availability of hundreds of thousands of apps, there's a solution for almost everyone, for business or personal use.
Partners and independent reps are using iPads (and other tablets) and are demanding mobile content from their vendors.
To bring down costs, retailers are looking for ways to reduce space, and are replacing training kiosks with tablets.
By providing employees with tablets, companies can significantly reduce the use of paper and improve their efforts to "go green".
Organizations are always seeking the "leading edge" for their sales reps - a way to enhance the perception and positioning of their solutions. The "cool" factor associated with the use of a tech forward device like the iPad may provide this edge.
Tablets are easy to deploy because there's no need for IT involvement, resources or budget.
Tablets are a solution for situations where there's no assurance of Internet access.

From the findings, it's evident that these driving factors have pushed tablet usage across a range of business functions, while at the same time there remain challenges that contribute to the slowing of tablet adoption and strategy in organizations. I will cover these findings in a future post.

Are there other instances that you can think of that are propelling tablet adoption in the channel?

“Channel Smart” – A Data-driven Approach to Channel Management

Mukund — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:19:00 GMT

Several years ago, one of my mentors suggested that I refine my go-to-market strategies using what he called “Channel Science” – a combination of words not easily understood in channel management practices today. While there is no dearth of consultants or so-called business transformation experts who can elaborate on how to design and run channel programs, implement partner portals, or automate channel sales processes – most of them, incredibly, miss the “Science” or “Data” aspects of the problem. As a result, several manufacturers in the over $1 trillion-a-year high-tech industry continue to run their global channels with a patchwork of spreadsheets, low-quality transaction data, ill-defined customer/partner information, and incentive programs run amok – all facets of the underlying problem of channel visibility. Furthermore, IT projects aimed at addressing the “channel data” or “channel visibility” problem continue to be a low priority – a frustrating experience for channel and sales operations managers.

Thankfully, there is an answer – and, no surprise in today’s ‘Big Data’ world, it lies in the data. Having guided several leading high-tech companies through various aspects of this problem, we have compiled some learnings that might well be on the list of 2012 resolutions for any Channel Operations team:

Step 1: Data? What Data?! Seriously, I have heard this refrain too often. Capturing high-quality data from your global partners (especially Tier-1) is an imperative. Simple as this task may sound, difficulty making it happen for any partners other than the 10-20% providing EDI or equivalent feeds is one of the top reasons for our customers to engage with us. Automating and standardizing the global data capture process and getting daily or weekly visibility into sales transactions is a non-trivial problem that most organizations classify in the “Do Not Try This At Home” category.

Step 2: How Dirty is Your Data? The “heavy lifting” – validating, identifying, matching, enriching – to generate a clean, meaningful data set can make all the difference. Most organizations have a difficult time identifying their partners and end-customers in a transaction – let alone having the confidence to pay their sales people commissions based on those transactions. Having the right product/SKU code, the correct partner/end-customer name, sales territory, price, etc. goes a long way in making the data trustworthy and usable across the organization.

Step 3: Show Me the Money! Incentive programs – love ‘em, hate ‘em. Incentives and rebates of all kinds, estimated at 10% of sales (yup, that’s $100B+ for those CFOs counting), have proven to be a major driver of sales. However, the complexity of rebate programs and the inability to track them has meant significant profit and margin erosion. Worse yet, piles of claims waiting to be processed by Finance mean dissatisfied partners, and by extension, a dissatisfied sales force. A robust solution for program tracking and validationprogram tracking and validation could turn a major headache into a source of significant savings. (Click here to learn more about this topic.) Revenue recognition is another example where the Finance organization is left to piece together projections that are incomplete without the availability of accurate data.

Step 4: Analyze This! Turn Channel Managers into Power Users. Who says channel account and sales managers don’t like data? Our experience indicates that when presented with high-quality channel data in easy-to-use dashboards, managers and analysts love to slice and dice the data by product, geography, sales rep, territory, channel class, time – and make critical decisions on a daily basis. Examples include inventory planning for product transitions, holiday bursts, sales territory assignment, culling the partner base, and more. Throw in market segments, channel trends, and benchmarks to compare their regions and partners against, and you give them true sales intelligence. In many cases, they will know more about their partners’ business than the partners themselves!

Step 5: Come Together, Right Now! Integrate with CRM/PRM. Sales organizations are increasingly relying on CRM to help streamline their sales processes – including partner interactions. Once you have good channel data, why not provide this visibility to your field sales – right within your CRM environment? Think about the data-driven conversation a Channel Account Manager can have—for example, with VARs in his/her sales territory, about recent Opportunities, or recruiting and cultivating new partners – when armed with the latest view of sales and inventory levels, all available as part of the VAR’s CRM Account profile.

Importantly, these steps have had proven success -- just ask the dozens of Zyme customers who have become “Channel Smart!”

Join our WEBINAR: Show Me The Money! How Good Channel Data Improves Incentive Payments Ted Dimbero from Zyme will talk about how companies can improve business processes such as incentive payments and sales commissioning through better channel visibility—made possible by timely, accurate channel data. Ted will also highlight some of the benefits companies realize through channel-data best practices, such as significant savings in incentive payments.

Channel Landscape for 2012

Tracy Delphia — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:56:00 GMT

The calendars have been turned to 2012 and with the holidays behind us, it’s time to roll up our sleeves for a new year. I’m sure we are all looking forward to a prosperous year.

Turning the calendar also means it is time for the annual round of predictions for the industry to surface. I’m working with members of our executive team right now as we polish our own Channel predictions for the year. As part of our upcoming webinar, we survey the landscape setting the stage for the Channel in 2012. These are the six elements that we feel will ground trends within the Channel this year:

Economic recovery
Mobile technology
Social
Cloud
Data, and
Consumerization

Watching the economic indicators and stock market on a daily basis is enough to give anyone vertigo these days. The reality is that economic recovery for the next year is uncertain although the last few weeks have been more encouraging than the rollercoaster of November and most of December. Forrester is predicting slow, but overall positive growth with Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America showing the highest growth rates and Western and Central Europe lagging the most. The channel impact will mean that most companies will plan for slow growth with longer sales cycles and budgets that may be contingent.

In 1949, Popular Mechanics indulged in a bit of prediction and hazarded a guess that “computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.” What a shock the proliferation of mobile devices – many handheld – would have been! While mobile technology is affecting how we play, more profoundly, it affects how (and where) we work. Gartner estimates that smartphones will outnumber desktops and laptops – combined – in a mere two years (2014). The three verticals most heavily influenced by mobile technology right now are sales, healthcare, and education. And it’s the “sales” member of that trio that may be of interest for vendors in the Channel looking for innovative ways to work with their Channel. Your Partner sales teams are often engaging with customers where they can get the most traction – on site. And that means there are increased opportunities for partner engagement and communication using mobile technology.

One of my favorite bits of trivia making the rounds over the last few months concerns Facebook: if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world with a population somewhere around 500 million (China at 1.35 billion and India at 1.2 billion lead the way). The Channel has moved well beyond the question of “if” around Social and now vendors are more interested in “how” – to use Social. McKinsey reports businesses that maximize Social strategies enjoy a 24% higher revenue growth than less social businesses. Within the Channel, Social means that engagement shifts from thinking less about “Partners” and more about “individuals” – less about faceless, generic groups of companies selling your product, and more about the specific characteristics that make the persons on your Partners’ teams an important part of your extended sales efforts.

In 2001 Tom Siebel was talking about Salesforce.com and suggested “there’s no way that company exists in a year.” Another example of a crystal ball that probably needed a refurbishing. Cloud computing is driving a paradigm shift that is seen by many to be as pervasive as the introduction of the Internet. Estimates on growth vary, but all are aggressive with the global cloud computing market predicted to be somewhere around $150-160 billion by 2013 and as much as $240 billion by 2020 (Forrester, Gartner, Merrill Lynch). The Cloud is driving a huge shift in the Channel as Partners and Vendors alike are working to adapt to a recurring revenue model of business.

The proliferation of data raises a whole host of issues for the industry from security to MDM. Bill Gates had no idea that storage conversations would graduate so quickly to terabytes, petabytes, and zettabytes in 1981 when he said “640k ought to be enough for anybody.” Forrester estimates the growth of data at 800% in just the last five years and IBM believes that business email is growing 25-30% annually (no trouble believing that prediction!). One of the key issues with all this data is that it provides no insight if it is unorganized. Channel Management teams struggle to evaluate the success of their individual programs, communications, campaigns, etc. because they often have too much data and too little insight into what it really means. 2012 should see a greater commitment to analytics in the Channel and integration of programs to yield a “single source of truth” to facilitate program adjustments and maximize Channel investments.

Technology innovation used to flow from the enterprise to the consumer market. That has reversed dramatically in the last few years as the consumer market has become the wellspring for innovation. Today 45% of employees feel their personal computing devices and applications are better than what their IT departments provide. Contrast that with the much smaller 27% of executives who have a clear strategic vision for employee adoption of consumer technologies (Accenture). Employees also expect the same user experience in business that they enjoy using their own technology – from the shopping cart and reviews characteristic of an online experience like Amazon, to the “any time, any where” availability of information. The impact of consumerization on the Channel is Partners are often looking for a similar easy-to-use experience when interacting with Vendors that they get when they use technology in their private lives.

What trends do you see populating this Channel “landscape”? You can join me and our executive team on the 11th by clicking here to find out which trends we’ll be watching this year.

Bring on 2012

Estelle Johannes — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:31:00 GMT

For most of us it’s our 1st week back to the old grindstone and the holidays already seem like a distant memory!

So let’s focus on the positive then: The Channel Focus Community has a fantastic webinar coming up “Show Me The Money! How Good Channel Data Improves Incentive Payments”; and don’t forget the Channel Focus UK and Channel Focus North America with Latin America Events coming up!

Looking ahead, we welcome anyone who would like to participate and contribute in the community by being a blogger; presenting a webinar or starting a discussion; working together we can make 2012 an exceptional year for our over 5000 strong Channel Focus community members. Email me on ejohannes@baptie.com

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." - ARISTOTLE

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CFocusCommunity

Linkedin:http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2460374&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Aberdeen Survey - PRM and Channel Sales Enablement

Jon Whitlock — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:36:00 GMT

Survey conducted by Aberdeen

I thought this survey would be of interest to community members. The survey is open through the end of January 2012 and takes about 15 minutes to complete. And you'll receive a free copy of Aberdeen's full completed report. Individual responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate.

Click here to take the survey

The survey is being conducted by Peter Ostrow, a Research Director at Aberdeen Group. The resulting report will provide companies with a roadmap for leveraging best practices around enabling solutions and technologies, including portals, marketing, content management and training, as well as contract management, configure/price/quote and incentive/compensation management solutions.

7 Ways Video Improves Channel Partner Training

Jon Whitlock — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:50:00 GMT

Claire Schooley's July 2011 Forrester report "Informal Learning Garners Acceptance As A Legitimate Learning Approach" states that traditional training methods are not meeting the needs of our extended workforce, including our partners. She recommends an informal learning approach that integrates short videos into overall corporate training strategies.

By incorporating video into your partner onboarding and training, you'll obtain these important benefits:

More effective learning. Studies have shown that people retain 65% of materials that combine voice and visuals as compared to only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they see or read.
Content delivery in today's preferred medium. YouTube is 2^nd only to Google as the most popular method of searching for and consuming informal training. Video is easy to access and search while on the road from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Just-in-time learning. Learning at the time of need is often the most effective and remembered type of training. Video provides on-demand, just-in-time training anytime and anywhere a partner needs it, like right before a sales call.
Higher impact. We've all experienced the impact of a memorable photo or image. Video is even more compelling. You can depict real-life demonstrations and customer selling situations that partners can relate to AND repeat.
Ability to easily revisit training. Video enables partners to quickly review and refresh their product knowledge on-the-go - translating to more sales.
Better time management for Channel Account Managers. Use video to deliver content such as policies, programs, product features and benefits - and let your channel account managers focus their time on working with partners to build sales.
More effective measurement. With Brainshark video presentations, detailed tracking and reporting provides the information for you to effectively measure your partners' engagement and learning.

Here is a good example of video for partner training from BASF Clearfield.

Also,check out this blog article to see more, How Brainshark [video] Enables Channel Partners at EMC, by Cathy Kenneally, Quality Program Manager at EMC. Cathy discusses the benefits of using video to make training easier for partners, while helping her to save time and money.

Do you have experience using video and informal learning in your channel strategy? I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.

“Revolution” in Information Usability and Consumption

Mukund — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:57:00 GMT

Recently, I attended a presentation where Gartner Analyst Bill Hostman talked about the ongoing “revolution” in information usability and consumption. One of the trends he discussed at the QlikView Business Discovery Tour was the “consumerization” of enterprise software and tools, including business intelligence. Business users are demanding more information in easy-to-use, fast, fun tools. They want solutions that enable them to be self-reliant and provide the necessary flexibility to view and analyze the data that is personally relevant to them. They want to access to this data when and where they deem convenient, e.g. CRM, mobile devices.

In the world of channel data, Zyme believes that business users can benefit enormously from easy, immediate visibility into their sales and inventory data, especially when they have the tools to analyze the data and identify trends. Our family of ZAP Dashboards, powered by QlikView, have become must-have tools for our customers in making timely business decisions.

Several Zyme customers recently shared best practices for analyzing channel sales and inventory data at our Customer Working Group. We were pleased to hear them describe the ways they use ZAP Dashboards for:

• Inventory management, e.g. Preventing lost sales due to stock outs; minimizing excess inventory by monitoring by product, geography, and partner

• Channel development, e.g. Identifying new partners; tracking market share trends by geography

• Sales management, e.g. Optimizing pricing based on sales velocity trends; developing vertical market strategies based on sales trends

• Financial reporting and compliance, e.g. Improving the accuracy of incentive payments; improving the accuracy of reserves through better tracking of returns.

Let us know if you have other best practices that you’d like to share. For more information on QlikView’s Business Discovery tour and, presentations from Zyme and Gartner, please click here.

ROI is not a game to produce a number. ROI should focus on what management expects from channel investment programs.

Tony White — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:39:00 GMT

For most of us, the day-to-day challenges of planning, monitoring and executing programs leave little if any time to take a step back and evaluate return-on-investment (ROI). With budgets under increasing scrutiny and pressures to justify or defend investments, we find increased pressure to be accountable for results that contribute to the bottom line.

With all of the emphasis on marketing ROI, the truth is, there is no “one size fits all” solution. At its core, ROI metrics should provide visibility into how broadly and efficiently marketing reaches target prospects, which lead sources are most productive and how effective sales converts them into revenue.

Campaign flags and tracking are ways to measure ROI by identifying leads by campaign codes, then tracking them through a lead generation process. This approach measures cost per response or cost per sale by capturing the activity cost, quantity produced, response rates, and conversion rates. However, measuring activities across multiple campaigns becomes much more difficult because each program consists of many activities utilizing different mixes of resources, in varying amounts across many markets.

Funnel formulas are used to calculate ROI indicators in terms of revenue return. For example, a seminar may attract 100 attendees resulting in 20 leads and 10 proposals. Of those proposals, 5 may result in sales with an average revenue per sale $10k. Following this funnel formula would allow you to express the ROI on 100 attendees as $50k of revenue.

Capability formulas are effective ways toexpress ROI in terms of investments in the partners and their capabilities. What is a capable partner worth in terms of annual revenue.What is the margin associated with revenue vs. the investment? Does investment in partner training, demo units and funded head produce demonstrable gains in terms of review?

However, before we put the cart before the horse perhaps we should begin by tying our metrics to management’s expectations about marketing and to corporate strategy. If management expects marketing to build brand equity, then measure that. If delivering sales prospects is important, measure that. If increasing the lifetime value of customers is important, measure that.

What metrics are you using that tie into your management’s expectations about marketing and strategy?

The Channel Focus Community

Estelle Johannes — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:20:00 GMT

Welcome to the 1st blog of the channel focus community - as I am a novice at writing blogs all I can say is hang on; this might be a bumpy ride.

So lets jump straight in - with over 5000 community members we want to highlight whats going on in the community and make it easy for you to get the information you want!

1. There are 2 great channel events coming up - the one is Channel Focus UK 2012 in 12 & 13 March and Channel Focus North America in 26 & 27 April. Hear presentations from experts in the industry - our speakers are truly some of the brightest stars in the industry with experience from channel strategies to best practice methods ; not to mention the revered workshops we host to discuss key take ways that you can implement as soon as you get back to the comfort of your office. There is also the opportunity to network with peers, building relationships and getting to meet the Channel Focus Team staff in the flesh. Watch this space for regular updates on the events.

We have just confirmed a bunch of speakers for Channel Focus UK - Jeremy Butt, VP Global Channels - Avaya; Keith Carter, VP Channels EMEA - POLYCOM; Jacqueline Davey, VP Business Partner Organisation and Midmarket UK & Ireland - IBM; Richard Hudson, MSSI VP EMEA Channel & Solutions - Motorola

If the Channel Focus UK event is of interest to you we have a super rate of £795.vat for all community members and for anyone who’s looking to go to our Channel Focus North American Event the rate is $1395.

2. Regularly updated content from social media to partner collaboration is found in our content library; you can also find any past webinars you may have missed in this section of the site. There is a discussion group where you can post questions or a discussion and create a dialogue with your fellow community member.

As we are all looking ahead to whats coming up in 2012, I urge you to send me (ejohannes@baptie.com) any comments and suggestions for the community. We value your input and with your help we can make a community that is tailored for you.

I'll sign off with some wise words, needless to say they are not my own "Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment." - Baltasar Gracian

Go to http://channelfocus.baptie.com to get updated with blogs, content, discussions & events on the community, you can follow us on:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Estelle29

Linkedin:http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2460374&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

Syndicate Content Through Your Own People

Olivier Choron — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:01:00 GMT

Use your own sales teams and channel partners to syndicate your company’s social media content.

OK, so you’ve got a new solution to talk about. You create a press release… you talk about it via your corporate social media sites… you add it to your channel newsletters… you stick it on your intranet. Job done. Fly my beauty, fly…

Or will it? Have your channel managers told their partners exactly what’s in it for them? Have your direct-touch teams let their end-user prospects know about the benefits of the new solution? Have your partners told their own end-users about it?

The trend of integrating social media into internal communications has been on the rise for a while, with the term ‘the social intranet’ being bandied about more and more. But the real question is… are your people syndicating content as well as they could?

Imagine then, a different scenario. Marketing presses the ‘go’ button on a fantastic new SMB solution you’ve just launched. Within seconds, your channel managers receive the appropriate partner/ benefit-led content relating to the solution. At the touch of a button they repost this content via their own LinkedIn accounts and inform all their partner/ channel contacts.

At the same time, your direct-touch sales staff receive their content about the launch in real-time, but now with an end-user spin. They are able to share that information with their own base of followers, be prospects or customers, via LinkedIn and Twitter, even reaching specific social ‘groups’ with the content.

Simultaneously, your channel partners receive their own version of the end-user announcement and can repost it in a matter of 3 clicks on their own social media networks, reaching out to prospects and end-users you have no direct connection with.

Nirvana? Yes. Realistic? Most definitely.

Not only have you achieved real-time communication of your product launch, you’ve also targeted the content with precision in a matter of seconds to all tiers of your channel including your own people internally. Now that’s pretty neat eh?

Zee© Principle

Tony White — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:15:00 GMT

In a recent meeting an experienced channel marketing manager remarked, “2012 looks very interesting. I need to focus on fewer partners and help increase their returns instead of spreading my budget thinly across my channel.” Sound familiar to you?

In practice channel programs are becoming more complex each year and channel partners often comment that participation in programs is becoming increasingly more difficult. How many times do we hear the phrases “make it easy to do business” or “simplify the program” when talking to the channel.

Is there a one-size-fits-all program? Probably not, but over the years I have observed some programs adopted by the channel which have produced excellent results. These programs have common themes that can be summarised by the Zee©Principle.

The Zee©Principle focuses on a holistic measurement system based upon the balanced scorecard concept. When applying it to the channel there are four steps to consider:

1. Choose the right partner behaviours to drive brand through the channel

2. Help partners execute them to the right level of quality to drive results

3. Select the right partners to focus on the right customers

4. Implement the correct methods of measurement to show business improvement

Does your programme embrace these four steps? Does the Zee Principle make sense for your programme?

Five Ways to Jumpstart Your 2012 Partner Programs - Webinar Replay

Jon Whitlock — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:41:00 GMT

Last week, Kirsten Michelon from Xerox and I joined Estelle from Baptie & Company to deliver a webinar on Five Ways to Jumpstart Your Partner Programs for 2012 to its channel community. We opened up with some stats from Forrester Research on the challenges of onboarding and training sales people due to turnover rates, ramp up times, and lack of retention - especially considering the number of products they carry. I then discussed 5 ways to improve partner mindshare, training and sales support. Kirsten's finale provided a look at examples of how Xerox is preparing for 2012 to help their partners sell more.

Click here for a replay of the webinar. I recommend using the Table of Contents to hit the parts which are most important to you:

A quick recap of the five ways:

Learning in short bytes - Increase overall reach of your content and retention by your partners with training and information in short bytes that are clear, concise and to the point. Video, like Brainshark, allows you to do that and significantly increases retention over text-based materials.
Self-service content delivery model - make sure your training and sales support content is easy to access and use by partners, and is consistently accessible from all devices whether PC, tablet or smartphone.
Training "on the go" with mobile content - partners will use it because it is easy to get to and available at a time when they need it most, like on the road right before a customer meeting.
Ensure your content is timely and updated throughout the year - choose a portal platform that allows you to easily update and add content throughout the year. Start with your kick-off and extend to playbooks partners can use for each phase of their sales cycle.
Analyze the Data - track the effectiveness of your content and communications. Use consistent metrics to determine who is listening, what are they listening to, what they learning and what are they sharing with customers.

Kirsten showed the IMPACT Marketplace, a suite of training, sales and marketing tools all in one place on the Xerox Partner Portal. The Marketplace provides partners and partner managers with a one-stop destination to learn, generate demand and close business that:

Makes it easy to find and use content online, all in one place
Encourages use and retention by including mobile video presentations for training and sales
Integrates the tools in such a way that they leverage each other, including on-demand access to content they can co-brand and use with their customers
Provides metrics to help Xerox Channel Marketing, Channel Partner Managers, and partners follow up in an informed and timely manner to drive sales.

How is your organization preparing for 2012? Please comment and share your experiences.

ROI – Fact or Guess?

Tony White — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:09:00 GMT

Many vendors require reporting of Return on Investment (ROI) indicators as a condition of their MDF Programs. Are these indicators accurate or are they best guess? Are your ROI indicators appropriate and relevant for your program context?

Nearly every vendor collects some sort of ROI indicator but consider the following:

Is your ROI measure an indicator or an absolute measure: i.e Revenue?
Are you measuring ROI at the right point?
Have you thought about the correct measure or are you measuring what you can?
How are you going to measure activities that are predominantly focussed on brand awareness?
Will your ROI indicators influence your future investment model?
How will you manage non-provision or inaccurate ROI reporting?

Take a fresh look at the way you measure ROI, challenge what you have in place and shed new light on your program success.