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Advance Blog

Why Your Partner Planning Process May be a Train Wreck & How to Get Back on Track

Why do partners dread business planning with their vendor teams?  Because it is one of the most unsatisfactory, waste-of-time activities they participate in every year.  Typically, the only part of joint business planning that is “joint” is done with a vendor channel account manager.

Train Wreck

Ninety percent of the value of most partner business planning processes goes one way – from the partner the vendor.  A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a well-respected partner executive.  I asked him a few questions about partner business planning:

Gary: “Do you do joint business planning with all of your major vendors?”

Executive: “Yes, ad nauseum”

Gary: “Why that response?   Wasn’t the joint planning useful?”

Partner: “All of our major vendors arrange business planning work-sessions as a requirement of our ongoing relationship.   Funding, rebates, marketing, and other support elements are discussed and planned in each joint planning work-session at the beginning of their fiscal year. The problem is that, more often than not, the vendor rep is missing key information about our relationship including LY & YTD sales, rebates earned, and our performance on other key program elements. Additionally, we rarely have quarterly business reviews (QBRs) throughout the year and we are almost always in the dark about where we stand with our vendor’s programs. What is the point of going through all this trouble to build a plan and establish program goals when they are not measured and tracked?”

Gary: “I can see that this is a major point of frustration with your vendors. How would you recommend your vendors change their planning and performance management processes to make them more valuable for you?”

Partner: “First of all, come prepared with all the right data that is necessary to build a meaningful plan.  Second, make it a joint plan where mutual goals are shared, and mutual commitments are made to each other to support the achievement of these goals.  And finally, conduct regular business performance reviews where we discuss each party’s performance-to-plan achievements. “

This brief interview highlights a high level of frustration coming from partners that are required to participate in poorly designed planning processes from their vendors.  For most vendors, partner planning is not working well to meet either their goals or the goals of their partners. Here is a list of the six reasons partner planning and performance management is failing you.

Six Key Factor

The good news is that none of these barriers are insurmountable and all can be addressed with tools and systems that are commercially available today. At Successful Channels, we know that channel managers and partners that build plans using our professional, guided, and integrated joint planning & QBR tools generate between 10-25%+ growth vs. prior year. Partners will participate earnestly in this commitment development process with their vendors because they receive immediate, measurable value from the joint planning exercise. They know that their efforts will be rewarded with regular (monthly, quarterly) performance to plan reviews with their partners.

Join Planning Process

Putting these principles into action is possible with a professional partner planning and performance management platform. Here are some examples of guided planning process exhibits from these systems to simplify, streamline and add value to both CAMs and partners.

Partner Performance Scorecard:  This is an example of a one-page partner performance summary on all key program dimensions. This is an excellent tool to conduct a partner business reviews at any time online or export to PPT.

Partner Performance Scorecard

Partner Capabilities Scorecard:  This is a 5-minute tool to assess your partner’s capabilities, score each success attribute on a 1-100 scale and build a customized action plan for improved partner performance.

Scorecard Summary

Partner Sales Planning and Process:  Build a 1 to 3 year product-level partner sales forecast using three optional methods. Estimate a percentage of prior year sales for products sold in the past, pre-packaged (recommended) forecast for new products, or build a new custom forecast for your product – all in minutes.

Business Plan

A Partner Marketing Planning Process:   A tool to help partners build ROI-based marketing plans with full lead-waterfall forecast, revenue, budget and ROI estimate.

Marketing Calculator

A Partner QBR PPT Builder Tool:  Channel managers can instantly build a QBR PowerPoint presentation where plan and performance-to-plan data is automatically integrated and can be annotated for finalizing the review

Partner QBR PPT Builder

You can make your partner planning and performance management process run like a Swiss high-speed train system – on-time, efficient, and highly effective and motivating to your partners.  The time to walk away from Excel-based partner planning processes that are not guided, not integrated, and deliver little partner value is now.  Tools to automate and streamline your partner planning and performance management processes are available and easy to implement.

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Architect Blog

Less is More when it Comes to Partner Business Planning and QBRs

Every channel leader is looking to generate greater commitments from their business partners, resellers, and agents to invest in and grow their brand. The challenge most channel teams struggle with is to build a partner’s enthusiasm and energy behind a sales and growth strategy to build business.img1

The best place to start to achieve this goal is to understand the motivations and priorities of your partners. About AuthorBen Wightman, head of data strategy at Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific, completed a study of partner motivations which are worth keeping in mind to build a partner commitment strategy.

10 Things resellers want from vendor programs (CRN March 2016 – Ben Wightman)

  1. More margin, more rebates
  2. More demand-generation support
  3. More sales support
  4. Better market differentiation
  5. Better communication
  6. More technical support
  7. Less program complexity
  8. More and better training
  9. Cross-sell, upsell and renewals support
  10. Joint annual go-to-market planning

There should be no surprises here, but it is important to work with your partners to demonstrate how each of their goals can be met. Number ten on the list above, joint annual go-to-market planning, is an excellent way to organize the partner engagement and commitment development.  The problem is that most partner business planning processes are too time consuming, not integrated with data, and not very satisfactory for either partners or channel managers.   Additionally, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are labor intensive, inefficient, and rarely completed with most partners.

The New Model for Partner Business Planning and Commitment Development

You may be tempted to try and measure everything with your partners, and with good intentions.

After all, if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it (Peter Drucker), right?  Beyond just closed-won revenue and your sales funnel you probably want to dig into key revenue drivers like lead generation, Market Development Fund (MDF) usage, account mapping, rep and SE training, goals, win rates, new customers, installed base refresh, cross-sell, service renewals, etc. etc.

Best Metric

However, your partners are busy, and you are just one of many vendors in their portfolio. They’re also sales people, so you’re taking their time away from selling – they need to see the value in the business planning process.

An ideal partner planning process serves the needs of you and the partner, allowing both of you to walk away with simple, achievable goals for the year, as well as a roadmap of how you are going to achieve those goals together.

Less is More

Align your partner’s goals with the critical goals of your business.

Less means your partner stays engaged and understands the plan. Start by developing a framework for a plan that can be summarized in a few bullet points. Your partner and your sales people are more likely to understand simple high-level goals vs. being in the weeds….

Example: Partner A

Goal: Grow revenue 20%

  • Maintain a quarterly funnel of $10M
  • Close 40 net new customers this year
  • Get 5 SE’s certified on new solution by June 1

What do you need to know to support that simple plan?

Required Partner Planning Metrics

These are critical metrics to consider for gaining commitment from your partners to invest in your brand:

  • Revenue and funnel history and goal
    • Planning at the top line is fine if buying patterns at a more detailed level (product, solution) are uncertain
  • New customers, existing customer upgrades and cross-sell
  • Account planning: Track progress on current opportunities and plan to target new accounts
  • Rebate attainment, incentive payouts, MDF and/or coop attained: Are there other monetary goals that motivate the partner?

Optional Partner Planning Metrics: Pick the best, delete the rest

  • Market share: What is your share of the partner business?
    • Allows you to know your growth potential (TAM)
    • Are you financially important in their overall business today? (Don’t expect a partner to spend a lot of time on you vs. another brand that is 10x or 100x bigger)
  • Leads & opportunities: How many leads did they bring you and how many did you bring them?
  • Margin: If the partner will participate, this can be more important to them than revenue.
  • Training: How many certified engineers does the partner have on staff?
    • Not all vendors need this or have this program
    • Less formal, ad hoc non-certification training may not need to be tracked in business planning

Start with top partners:  The more significant the relationship the more your partners and your channel team is willing to invest in building a meaningful joint business plan.

  • Key growth partners, keep it manageable for initial planning as well as check-ins and QBRs
  • Frequent monthly reviews (or more) on current pipeline
  • Monitor and reach out monthly on exceptions where goals are in danger of being missed
  • Quarterly QBR to review goals and progress
    • Make adjustment to quarterly pacing as needed
    • Review account targets, progress, add new and delete targets
    • Ensure quarterly changes still roll up to annual goal
    • Identify unmet partner needs and act
    • Collaborate on a plan to address unmet partner execution

Cadence Plan

Planning with reps instead of partner executives?

Some leading companies are setting business plans by not only by partner account but also by individual partner sales representative.

  • Who are your key reps or evangelists?
  • Focus on those that have a strong belief in your portfolio, understand a key vertical market/industry or know where to find a competitor’s customers
  • Selling your portfolio makes them a significant amount of money

Keeping it simple is even more important at the rep level

  • Select 1-3 metrics to manage
  • Less info collected allows for planning with more reps
  • Design with the intent that planning will be done over the phone
  • Tools that your reps and partner reps can access daily to see their progress
  • Top priority for the partner rep: How much can I make?
    • Second priority: How much will my employer make?
    • Reps are generally paid 15%-30% of the partner margin
    • Show how much they can make selling your portfolio based on expected margin plus additional incentives (SPIFs)
  • Spend MDF with them to help them achieve their goals

Partners are in favor of doing joint partner business planning because they understand that this is a commitment to each other’s success. Partners want to do plans that will be measured and reported throughout the year. This is all true if it is simple, requires little to no work to prepare, and provides updates based on progress throughout the year. Partner business planning, done simply and effectively, will generate higher growth partners, more committed to your brand and help you achieve your annual sales targets.

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Attract Blog

RIP Platinum, Gold, and Silver Partner Programs – the New Model is Here

Channel partners have proven to be remarkable change-agents, both in front of their customers and inside their own businesses. Thinking about the amount of churn over the past 35 years can be downright dizzying.RIP Partner Program

Starting from the first disconnected PCs to the recent highly-publicized ransomware attacks, channel partners have transitioned their skills to dozens of new technology opportunities. At the same time, they have transformed their business models from resell, break-fix, installation, and maintenance, to solution providing and recurring managed services, among others.

Article Author

The one thing that has stayed relatively constant over these decades is how customers decide and procure technology. Led by CIOs and IT departments, channel partners and vendors have fine-tuned their product and messaging mix to capitalize on this customer buying journey. Over the past couple of years, driven by the cloud and the growing acceptance of SaaS business ecosystems, this journey just took a significant turn.

Line of Business Executives are Influencing and Making the Majority of Technology Decisions

Forrester is reporting that 65 percent of technology decisions are influenced and/or made by line of business executives. These leaders of departments such as sales, marketing, customer experience, finance, operations and human resources are increasingly taking ownership of their own digital transformations. In fact, it is predicted that this number could rise to 80 percent by the year 2020.

Buyers For Business

What may be even more interesting is that 29 percent of these technology decisions have no involvement whatsoever by the IT department. The line-of-business executives are building the solution without internal help and in many cases are using external talent to advise on things like security, backup, compliance, disaster recovery, etc. They are also using their own money. Fifty two percent of business executives are using business-unit budgets to buy technology as opposed to assigned technology budgets from IT departments.

Buyer Shift is Creating a Huge Opportunity for the Channel

The new buyer is also creating massive channel opportunities – just not where we thought. 58% of business executives are significantly involved in deciding and hiring third party services firm to implement and integrate these projects into the back-end of their company. Because 73% of B2B buyers prefer buying cloud solutions directly from the vendor, we believe reselling technology and taking a front or back-end margin will soon become a relic of the past.

This Shift Has Led to the Creation of a New “Shadow Channel”

Business leaders are clearly looking for full-service solutions and are putting together the resources and teams to make it happen. They are increasingly relying on a new set of influencers or “shadow channels”:

Your Channel

  1. SaaS consultants and implementation partners. Thousands of new partner companies have been created to add value around SaaS platforms. These are line of business experts who understand cloud-driven best practices and have gone deep with very few vendors. Examples of ecosystem players include Salesforce in sales, Marketo in marketing, NetSuite in finance, and Workday in HR. Unlike traditional channel partners, many of these ecosystem partners are pure-play with only one vendor and have developed deep integration skills into multiple back-end systems.
  2. Industry-based professional services firms. In an effort to expand their own businesses and offer a full-service suite in front of the customer, many ancillary service or consulting companies supporting nearly every industry are becoming technology companies. Accounting, legal and marketing firms are examples of industry-specific professional services firms that are quickly transitioning to software and IT services companies. By the year 2020, more than 80 percent of accounting and marketing firms will be indistinguishable from traditional IT channel partners. Legal is slightly lower at 55 percent, but still heading the same direction.
  3. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). There are thousands of software companies that have been built inside large SaaS ecosystems. They add value to business leaders as they take generic platforms and customize them to their sub-industry, segment, or geography. Some of these companies are unicorns – valued at over $1B in the market – and focus on adding tools, customized workflows and specialized industry solutions. In many cases, they are focused on recurring software revenue and provide services for free.
  4. Born in the Cloud. With a business model tuned to project-based revenue, these firms add value to business leaders by providing back-end integrations, security, backup, disaster recovery, compliance, and a host of other critical services to make a complete solution. They don’t tend to participate in standard vendor channel programs and prefer incentives that don’t require them to resell or accept customer payments.
  5. Start-ups. Looking to disrupt traditional industries, the B2B startup community has found business leaders to be receptive to hyper-targeted products that are focused on specific business problems. These business leaders tend to be less risk-averse than IT departments and be willing to test products that are specialized around their business objectives. There is a massive funding and support structure built for these B2B start-ups including angel networks, venture capital and private equity.

Traditional Partners Must Adapt or Perish

Traditional partners are facing challenges breaking into the new decentralized line of business buyer. This includes an inherent weakness in marketing skills. As the book “The E-Myth” masterfully outlined, most SMB channel partners are technicians at heart and haven’t focused on the sales and marketing skills required to scale their business. Now that there are ten times the buyers at each customer, this weakness will be amplified. Many vendors are also guilty of focusing only on the IT buyer and have a serious visibility problem with the new buyer as well, assuming their products and services are even relevant in this new world.

Traditional channel partners can also suffer from lack of sophistication. About a decade ago we started a march towards specialization. The secret to success was becoming verticalized in certain markets and industries. The new buyer is looking for a level of hyper-specialized skills around business outcomes. In this new world, “vectorization” is now required which means having skills germane to the line of business itself, customer size and segment, sub-industry, geographic nuances and business technology application and how it integrates https://wescoal.com/buy-silagra-sildenafil/ with the organization as a whole.

Finally, traditional partners may not have the will to change. This industry is about 35 years old, and most of the traditional channel started their companies in the 1980s with IBM, Apple or Compaq or in the early 1990s with the rise of Microsoft. It doesn’t take long at an industry event to see that the aging channel is not being replaced by millennials. In fact, IT does not rank in the top 10 of desirable industries for college grads today according to CompTIA. After surviving all the technology and business model twists and turns, and with 40% of the channel planning retirement in the next 7 years (CompTIA), there may be a lack of energy or enthusiasm for this latest curveball.

This is more difficult than adding a new technology practice or specialty to the line card or changing a business model. Working with a completely different buyer, with different preferences, motivations, requirements, and levels of influence will profoundly challenge the channel like nothing before it.

The new “shadow channel” has emerged as a response to this change in business buyer behavior.  This means that many traditional IT-centered partners are becoming more and more out of touch with biggest growth opportunities for the brands they represent.   IT-centered sales strategies are yielding increasingly lower returns for partners because their target buyer is out of the loop for many / most business service and technology buying decisions.

Channel Managers are the Key for Opening Up the Shadow Channel for Brands

Channel Managers hold the keys to the kingdom in the rapidly evolving traditional and shadow channel market.   The traditional precious metals (Platinum, Gold, and Silver) programs are simply obsolete, not motivating in the new market, and not aligned with new classes of partners.  The new channel program model must be based on the development of mutually agreed upon goals where both the partner and vendor needs are aligned.   Channel Managers play a key role in working with partners of all kinds to help define their needs, create joint business plans, scorecards, and action plans to achieve these mutually agreed upon goals.

Channel Manager Model

Joint Partner Business Plans Replace Platinum, Gold, and Silver Program Structures:

The adage of “applicable to everyone but relevant to no one” applies to dated “precious metals” partner programs.  These programs are simply not flexible enough to help manage and motivate partners of all types.  The new joint business plan partner program model helps partners establish their own program goals that are best aligned with their priorities.   The result is a set of much more committed partners that are motivated to succeed.

The key to success of this new model are trained and enabled channel managers that can serve as business growth and capabilities consultants to partners of all types.   A channel manager’s role must be a business advocate for their partners.   The needs of traditional and “shadow” partners are simply too diverse to rely on the old Platinum, Gold and Silver program structure.

The New Channel Manager Management Process:

The new joint business planning-driven partner program management structure requires that channel managers complete a range of steps to more effectively manage their territory and assigned partners

Annual Channel Manager Planning Activities:

  • Profile & scorecard all current traditional partners: Complete an annual profile and capabilities scorecard of all partners to determine ability to support IT and functional buyers
  • Build joint business plans and performance targets with all traditional partners: Collaborate to set partner-specific sales and pipeline targets based on their capabilities, market and current opportunities
  • Inventory all new potential “shadow” partners that can deliver more growth: Complete a market analysis to identify complementary, functionally-focused new partners that can bring in new classes of clients
  • Profile and scorecard all new “shadow” partners to build a capability plan: Profile new partners to determine strengths and focus enablement actions to improve performance
  • Build joint business plans with new shadow partners: Based on the partner’s scorecard, build a joint business plan that sets sales and pipeline targets and support plans with each new shadow partner

Monthly / Quarterly Planning & Performance Management Activities:

  • Monthly Business Performance Review: Once joint business targets are set, use a one-page Partner Performance scorecard to do performance-to-plan and pipeline-to-target reviews with partner monthly or more frequently
  • Monthly Account Planning Review: Collaborate with partner sales executives to review both pipeline deals along with account planning activities to identify potential cross-sell opportunities for your brand
  • Quarterly Capabilities Scorecard Review: Update the 5-minute capabilities scorecard to track a partner’s improvement progress and refine their action plan
  • Quarterly Business Review (QBR): Complete a comprehensive partner QBR every quarter or 2 times per year depending on size and potential of the partner

The generic “precious metal” partner program structure and level targets simply does not work for a growing inventory of traditional and new “shadow” partners.   What does work is a scalable and customizable joint partner planning and performance management process where partner goals are aligned with their priorities and market focus.   Achieving scale with this channel management process requires the use of automated tools to streamline and guide the process of joint partner business planning and performance management.

Channel organizations will become even more dependent on highly-trained and enabled Channel Managers to lead the partner commitment and capabilities development process.  The battle for growth will be won on-the-ground, in the territory, working with partners of all types to help them achieve their jointly negotiated goals.   Channel organizations that will win in the future will invest more, not less, in their Channel Manager team to help them better align partner goals with your brand goals.   The shadow channel is coming out of the shadows and will be displacing much of what we recognize as the traditional channel.   There is a potential “land grab” happening in the channel with new classes of partners and brands that pro-actively position themselves to support this market shift will find themselves outpacing the growth of their peers that are slower to adapt.

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Architect Blog

Why have VPs of Channel Sales Forgotten Best Practices Validated Over 160 Years Ago

In 1850, Isaac Singer introduced the first automatic sewing machine to be sold to homemakers and seamstresses for $10. Up to that point, sewing machines sold for hundreds of dollars almost exclusively to commercial businesses. Channel VP's Have Forgotten

Isaac Singer needed to create an entirely new channel to represent, demonstrate, sell and service his invention to a yet-to-be-developed consumer and small business sewing market. Isaac Singer personally recruited a range of new dealers and put together a “life-stage” management process to enable, train, motivate and measure dealer performance. The Singer Sewing Machine dealer program was the first of its kind and provided a blueprint for the modern channel structure that is still used today.

This dealer life-stage management process was inspired by the need to put existing and new entrepreneurs into the consumer sewing machine business. Isaac Singer’s vision for this management process was to provide a range of tools and resources to give potential dealers confidence in the Singer business model.

First Time Ever Dealer Life-Stage Cycle

By 1876, Singer had sold over 2,000,000 sewing machines through thousands of dealers worldwide. The dealer life-stage program, along with the excellent product, were the two major contributors to the success of Isaac Singer’s business. From the beginning, Singer made a commitment to the success of his dealers which gave them confidence to invest in growing their own sewing machine business.

Singer Sewing Company

In 1850, this type of dealer support program was revolutionary. The Singer Sewing Machine Company was putting dealers into business with excellent support, marketing materials and training globally. One of the many transformational elements introduced was the first-ever installment credit service. This enabled dealers to sell a $10 sewing machine to consumers on credit to dramatically widen the market potential and accelerate sales. Singer was even able to overcome dealer worries about investing in local marketing activities because they were concerned that the benefit may go to them or other competing dealers. He was able to convince dealers that it would build the overall market and, in-essence, build belief in the concept that “a rising tide raises all ships.” Dealers were motivated, committed, and invested in growth because they were successful. The Singer / dealer relationship was one of the best examples of a producer and its indirect channel achieving perfect alignment.

Why Have VPs of Channels Today Forgotten the Lessons of Isaac Singer?

With overwhelming evidence that a supported channel is a committed channel, why then have VPs of channels today forgotten the important lessons that Isaac Singer taught the world over 160 years ago?  Perhaps many current channel executives have never heard of the Singer channel success story and its blueprint for success.   Or perhaps this was a different time and a different set of circumstances. But there was a universal truth from the Singer channel development experience.

Key Lesson from the Singer Channel Strategy:  A supported, enabled, effective, and profitable channel will far outsell a direct-only sales strategy.

There is a lot of pressure on VPs of channel sales to deliver quarterly revenue targets.  Quarterly targets test our commitment and dedication to partner life-stage activation and enablement. Too often, when sales targets get tight, channel VPs will modify a channel enablement strategy to a direct sales strategy to help close short-term deals. The problem is when channel sales leaders default back to a direct sales orientation, this takes the emphasis away from building an independent partner-led channel. This lack of commitment to your partners will lead to a channel that becomes too reliant on the producer sales team. High growth channels, including the Singer Sewing Machine Company, are built on a commitment to professional partner life-stage development.

Two key methods for gaining higher partner commitment levels are life-stage scorecard systems and business plan / QBR systems. These tools guide partners and Channel Account Managers through a structured, repeatable, and effective partner life-stage management and performance measurement processes. They are designed to achieve the same thing that the Singer Sewing Company was able to accomplish with their dealers 160 years ago – a tangible expression of the producer’s commitment to the success of its dealer / partners.

Best Practice Partner

Partner Scorecards:  Each partner life-stage has a unique set of relevant scorecard metrics and to-do items to effectively enable and activate partners to produce at a high level.

Partner Joint Business Plans:  Each partner life-stage has a relevant set of goals, strategies, actions and targets that are appropriate for building partner commitments and performance measurement.

The highly successful Singer Sewing Machine channel strategy taught us that a commitment to partner life-stage activation, management and measurement will yield much greater partner satisfaction and commitment levels. At Successful Channels, we have found that channel organizations that use our 5-minute, cloud-based, CRM-integrated tools regularly execute life-stage scorecards, business plans and QBRs grow at 10-25%+ vs. prior year vs. partners that do not.

How Much Work is Partner Life-Stage Management? (5-10 Minutes)

It sure seems like a lot of work to support eight different partner life-stages, particularly if each partner is at a different stage resulting in a totally different set of tasks. It is hard to imagine how a channel manager can effectively manage these tasks without the help of life-stage management scorecards to target and track the right activities to the right partner. This work has to be automated, organized, and streamlined so channel managers and partners can work together to create productive, revenue-producing, and profitable representatives for your brand.

Here are a range of tools that are inspired by the Singer Sewing Company channel strategy. They enable channel managers to develop high-growth partners that are strong and independent representatives of your brand.

Best Practice Partner life-Stage Management Process

The key to reaching the same level of channel achievement as the Singer Sewing company is making partners feel supported, capable of succeeding, and profitable. Channel teams can gain strong commitments from your partners to invest in your brand with the use of joint business planning and profit modelling tools. Finally, it is equally important to measure performance-to-plan to celebrate successes and schedule improvements while keeping your brand at the top of your partner’s mind. These tools are designed to help your channel managers become excellent enablement and growth consultants to your partners at each life-stage in-order to get the most out of the relationship.

If Isaac Singer were still here today to advise channel VPs of sales on improving their strategy, he would likely say that they need to start with supporting their partner’s success. Provide them the tools and programs necessary to be successful and demonstrate to them that their success is the number one priority.    Unfortunately, channel VPs of sales don’t take this advice often enough.

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Advance Blog

The 3 Biggest Lies Channel Executives Tell Themselves Every Year

According to this year’s YouGov(https://www.mensfitness.com/weight-loss/burn-fat-fast/25-surprising-benefits-weight-loss)  survey on New Year’s resolutions, the number one response was to lose weight and the second was to exercise more. We all know why we make these annual commitments. We want to look better, live longer and be healthier.

Chennel Executives

Losing weight and exercising are on most people’s minds throughout the year but changing personal behavior and taking action is elusive. The same is true for channel executives as they assess where they are at the end of the year and prioritize what is needed to a meet their sales goals for the next year. Channel executives know that they need to build commitments with their partners to invest and grow sales for your brand and measure partner achievement of these goals. But saying it versus doing it is a lot like the challenge of losing weight and exercising.   It is an excellent idea until it is time to walk away from that delicious bowl of potato chips or take that first step onto the treadmill.  Taking the time and making the effort to profile and scorecard your partners, build joint sales targets and action plans and preparing quarterly business reviews (QBRs) across your partner network is infrequently done and typically only with a small percentage of partners.  Why?  Because it is hard work, inefficient, and hard to measure. The questions that channel executives ask themselves are:

  • Is it worth doing?
  • What is the value for the partner and/or channel managers?
  • Do I have time to create plans and measure performance-to-plan?
  • Can I get access to the data I need to complete this task?
  • Can I get the rollup reporting to measure channel performance at all levels?

Channel executives, just like most people making New Year’s resolutions, need to be convinced by the “business case” for making the investment and effort in the new behavior.

The “Business Case” for Top New Year’s Resolutions:

  • Lose Weight: (Men’s Fitness) The Top 10 Benefits of Losing Weight
    1. Better sleep
    2. Better hormonal balance
    3. Improved sex drive
    4. Better mood
    5. Less joint pain
    6. Clearer / brighter skin
    7. Stress relief
    8. More money
    9. More friends
    10. Fewer colds
  • Exercise More: (Healthline) Top 10 Benefits of More Exercise
    1. Feel happier
    2. Help lose weigh
    3. Stronger muscles and bones
    4. Increase energy levels
    5. Reduce risk of chronic disease
    6. Improve skin health
    7. Improve brain health and memory
    8. Improve sleep
    9. Reduce pain
    10. Better sex

Most people conclude that these benefits are very attractive and motivating and are worth striving for.   Similarly, partner business planning and performance management have an equally attractive set of “business case” benefits for channel executives.

The Business Case for Partner Business Planning: (Successful Channels) Successful Channels is a provider of channel / partner business planning and performance management tools and the results below are based on the outcomes from a range of their clients implementing these planning tools.

  • Partner Scorecards: (15-30%+ Capabilities Improvement) Channel teams that define best practice scorecards, assess partner’s performance, and create improvement action plans increase partner capabilities between 15-30%+ on key metrics within the first 12 months of deployment.
  • Partner Business Plans & QBRs: (10-25%+ Growth Vs PY) Channel teams that complete 12 to 36-month business plans, profit forecasts, and conduct QBRs (Including perf-to-plan, pipeline-to-target) every quarter achieve these growth levels.
  • Partner Account Planning: (10-25% increase in deal registrations) A process of meeting with partner sales executives to identify customers and prospects that represent good cross-sell opportunities for your brand. Channel Managers that regularly conduct “Account Planning” work-sessions with each key partner sales executive achieve this outcome.

If the business case is this strong for doing partner business planning and performance management activities, then why don’t more channel teams do them?   Much like losing weight and doing more exercise, you must do the hard work to realize the benefits.

Doing Partner Scorecards, Business Plans and QBRs just got easier!

Historically, partner business planning, scorecarding (profiling), and performance measurement is completed with the help of Excel spreadsheets in a disconnected, non-scalable format with no unified rollup reporting.   It is very labor intensive, difficult to manage and not very effective for either channel managers or partners.   New cloud-based tools developed by Successful Channels dramatically simplify and streamline these CAM / Partner business processes that can now be completed in minutes vs. hours.   Because of deep CRM integration, these tools are automatically fed by actual sales, pipeline and certification data to create up-to-date performance-to-plan reporting instantly for CAMs and partners.

5-10 Minute Partner Scorecarding

The “progress bar” navigation above will guide a CAM and partner through how to create a scorecard, business plan, action plan and QBR in minutes.   Each step is designed to take a CAM or partner by the hand and walk them step-by-step through the process of creating their scorecards and plans. This guided process makes it easy to create a joint plan for achieving partner / vendor goals in minutes.  Within each step sample values are provided to the user, much like a multiple-choice question instead of an open-ended question, where it is easier to pick from options for every planning decision that is needed to be made.   These tools will turn an average CAM into a high-performance expert channel manager that can spend most of their time providing expert consultative advice to their partners versus the old way where most of their time is allocated to data research and admin tasks to prepare for these partner meetings.

Here are few examples of screenshots from these guided partner business planning and QBR processes below.

Partner Performance Scorecard:  This is a section of an instant / real-time partner performance summary for partner performance-to-plan and pipeline-to-target along with other metrics for quick business review.

Partner Performance Scorecard

Partner Capabilities Scorecard:  This is a screenshot from a comprehensive partner assessment, scorecard, goal and action planning setting workflow tool to build partner capabilities.

Partner Capability Scorecard

Five Minute Quarterly Business Review PowerPoint Builder:   A series of screenshots for how a CAM can build a customized and comprehensive QBR and annotate with their comments in minutes

5 Minute PPT Builder

All the historical reasons for not doing partner scorecards, business plans and QBRs are no longer valid.  They are no longer too much work, too hard to gather the data, and based only in disconnected Excel workbooks.  With the assistance of cloud apps, partner planning and performance management can be completed in a fraction of the time, as virtually all partners and deliver meaningful value to both partners and CAMs. And all partners are able to deliver 10-25%+ growth vs. prior year and improve their capabilities and pipeline at the same time. There still may be some valid reasons not to lose weight or go to the gym, but there is no longer any valid excuse for not doing scorecards, business plans and QBRs for all your partners.

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Architect Blog

How Super CAMs Can Create the Perfect Sales / Enablement Balance in 2018

The tension between short-term channel sales target achievement and medium-term partner enablement has never been greater. At the end of 2017, I overheard a VP of channel sales saying to his CAM team “you can invest in enabling your partners as long as you are achieving your sales targets.”Super CAM

Any long service CAM knows how funny that quote is.  It is simply not possible to achieve your partner sales targets if you are not equally investing in enabling your partners for success.  Every work day a professional “Super CAM” is managing this balance between developing the next few sales opportunities with their partners while at the same time helping to build a self-sufficient, scalable, and effective partner.

Partner Enablement is Investing Well Ahead of Expected Return

It is getting harder and harder to find channel organizations that are steadfastly committed to partner enablement.   This is a classic example of investing well ahead of the anticipated return with uncertainty in ROI.   This is a struggle that every VP of channel sales deals with when making budget and resource allocation decisions. Providing partner training and certifications, learning management systems, partner sales incentives, and partner marketing dollars is expensive and hard work.  And the justification for these expenses is not easy to put together because the return is usually not immediate or is only indirectly related to this investment.   Unfortunately, when times get tough and sales targets are getting tight, one of the first things cut by VPs of channel sales are partner enablement budgets.    Pulling CAMs off important partner enablement activities happens too often in the channel to achieve short-term sales targets and sacrificing longer-term growth prospects from partners.

CAMs are Repairing the Engine While the Plane is Flying

Despite declining funds and focus on enablement, CAMs are still expected to achieve their numbers while at the same time building partners that will generate increasing rates of “partner-led” deals for their brand. The top performing CAMs, or “Super CAMs,” are experts at the balancing act of investing just the right amount of time in partner sales development efforts, while at the same time finding a way to help their partners get better.   This blog attempts to detail the practices of these “Super CAMs” that can keep the plane in the air and help get more lift and speed out of their channel engine as they build partner capabilities and relationships.

Two Levels of Super Partner Enablement & Activation

Level 1:  Partner Program Achievement Enablement

Most channel programs today define a set of expectations that they have for their partners to be successful. But these program definitions by themselves do not create motivated and activated partners.   CAMs need to help partners understand these program requirements, how they can achieve them, and create action plans and performance metrics for helping them monitor their progress along the way.   Super CAMs take all their partners through a level 1 Partner Program Achievement enablement exercise to ensure that they can succeed.

The program elements below are a set of expectations that your company has created to guide a joint business planning process between CAMs and partners.  Each metric area is an expression of a partner’s commitment to the vendor’s brand while at the same time is a blueprint for a partner’s success.  But these program elements don’t automatically lead to partner success.   Super CAMs take the initiative to build a partner scorecard, business plan and QBR process around these program metrics to engage, motivate and measure partner’s success.   There is a specific “how-to” to put these program metrics into action for an individual partner.   Each step below is the how-to process that Super CAMs use to help their partners internalize these program goals and take actions to achieve greater program performance.

Level 1

Super CAMs take these program requirements and turn them into a commitment and motivation building process with the help of a 5-minute scorecard, business plan and QBR tools.   They demonstrate how partners will be more successful, make more money, and be more satisfied with your brand.

There is also a second level of partner enablement and activation.   The second level of enablement is partner life-stage activation.   This is a process where Super CAMs meet partners where they are in their life-stage journey with your brand.  Each life stage requires a unique set of assessments and actions to advance your partner’s success.   This partner life-stage management process is made much simpler with the use of a scorecard system to assess, profile, measure and track partners and create customized action plans in minutes.

Level 2

For each of these metrics, in just 15 minutes, a Super CAM can provide their partners with a score from 1-100 of exactly where they stand on their life-stage journey along with a quarterly custom action plan.

Scorecard Score

Are There Super CAMs within your Organization?

Are you asking yourself if you have any mythical “Super CAMs” within your organization?  The answer is yes.   But very few regular CAMs become “Super CAMs” on their own.  They use tools to help them become highly efficient and effective in managing and motivating their partners.  These tools include a 5-minute partner scorecard, a 5-minute partner account planning tool, a 5-minute partner business plan, and a 5-minute partner QBR tool.   These tools integrate with your CRM / PRM to automatically bring in the required sales, pipeline, and other certification data and make it very easy to create custom improvement action plans for your partners.   Armed with these tools, CAMs and VPs of sales will never have to choose between a focus on sales or enablement.   Both goals will be achieved efficiently and effectively including short term revenue targets and long-term goals of a more self-reliant and partner driven channel growth program.

 

Channel Account Manager Reseller CXO Successful Channels Reseller Marketer Reseller Salesperson Channel Chief Image Map