Five Steps Towards Building a Winning Strategy for Tomorrow's Channel

We live in a time of unprecedented change and opportunity. Transformation is happening all around us at an increasingly rapid pace. The digital transformation of our global economy and society makes everything more connected, more intelligent and more vulnerable. As our digital and physical worlds merge, all facets of business are being impacted on a global scale – from jobs to trade policies to supply chains. Technology continues to disrupt business and service models as customer expectations increase. For those who can transform at scale, there are massive opportunities to connect people, ideas and experiences.

So how do you prepare your channel program for the oncoming revolution of the future and cloud?

Step One: Reassess
A strong partner scoring method is key to increasing the return on each partner’s relationship by understanding each one’s strengths and weaknesses. Traditional high-tech channel practices and partnerships that guarantee success are very different for cloud partnership.

Step Two: Strategize
When it comes to partner tiering, many vendors ask themselves, is the old precious metal tiering methodology still relevant”? In many cases, it’s not. The complexity of today’s channel ecosystem does not lend itself to taking a cookie-cutter approach such as precious metal tiering. It’s time to break away from a traditional one-size-fits-all approach to a more collaborative and personalized one. The first step is to segment partners by their role, skill sets and market focus. And, placing a stronger emphasis on partner profitability, which is closely tied to the business planning process.

Step Three: Enable
Enablement must be specialized by partner type and market focus. Create a solution enablement toolkit for each partner level that includes resources that allow partners to build and market their specialized offering. It’s also important to consider is that B2B tech partners are now targeting business leaders instead of IT.

Step Four: Analyze
Data is the best tool to help vendors examine technology solutions and demonstrate how the right mix of automation, intelligence and scale combine to help partners achieve their goals –regardless of complexities—in today’s channel management.

Step Five: Automate
The key to maximizing the value of the channel is to consider how channel programs and revenue data interact with revenue management processes. By tying channel programs and revenue management together, companies can utilize modern solutions that integrate channel program data with revenue management systems, automatically sharing data with downstream applications.

Download the eBook for a more in-depth look at the five steps you should consider when building or updating your program for channel of tomorrow.