Why is blogging easy and partnering hard?

The world is changing fast. It was not long ago that the only people who got published were journalists and authors. Publishing a book meant significant investment (and risk) on the part of somebody, either the publisher or the author. Now anyone can get published by setting up a blog with free blogging software like WordPress, and they can generate significant traffic and success.

When I created this blog, it took me about 15 minutes to set it up and write the first post. I chose the features I wanted from a set of applets, uploaded a custom image and invited the first people to read it. Total investment = zero. Return on investment as yet unknown.

We wonder why it is that running a channel sales program is therefore so prohibitively expensive. You need dedicated channel sales people on salary and customized software from a leading CRM tool. You might have one or more private portals created from scratch by a web designer, and the expense of maintaining and promoting these sites. The worse news yet, is that research shows that these significant investments in partnering, activation and recruitment yield typical results that are very mediocre. I have yet to meet a channel sales leader who is satisifed with the performance of their channel partners.

We think that social networking has the best chance to activate channel partners for these reasons:

• business is about relationships, social networking is about connecting people
• communication is improved
• a unified community is dynamic and interesting

Finally, we think that setting up your channel sales ecosystem with Web 2.0 tools should be no more difficult than setting up a blog. You should be able to do it in 15 minutes, and it should be free until it can demonstrate to you that its improving your bottom line.

This is our vision for AccountMaven – Push-Button Partnering.

Why sales people don’t like portals

Whenever I talk with a prospect, I ask them about their efforts at activating and connecting with channel partners. One of the questions I always ask, is if they have deployed a portal for their partners to access, and if so what the results were.

One thing that always astounds me is when I ask about the participation rate on that portal. IE: How many partners log-in, how often, and what do they look at. The most common answer to these questions is that they don’t have that information to hand. The sad reality is that these statistics are typically so low as to be too embarrassing to even talk about, particularly after the time and money that has been invested in this facility by the marketing department.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against partner portals. They are potentially an incredibly useful resource for communicating in an organized manner with your partners. They automate many of the routine tasks that you might have to do over and over of you did not have one. Like giving out pricing or product information. Assuming partners used them, the marketing department would relieve large burdens from the channel management folks by keeping good, current, well organized information in the partner portal. So why then is it that sales people (partners) simply don’t log in to these portals?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Sales people are busy and they are focused on sales. They don’t have time (inclination) to go searching around someone else’s portal for information that they would just as soon have emailed to them.
2. They already have multiple other systems to use, Outlook, CRM, Linkedin, Hoovers and others.
3. You are likely not their only partner. In some cases you may be one of several hundred or more.
4. Your portal is password protected. Sure you have them the password, but they lost it or never received it in the first place.
5. When they log into your portal, all they find is information about your company. (one dimensional). This is boring to a sales executive.
6. They have no way of interacting with others once in the portal. In most cases it’s simply a way to retrieve documents and information.

I think the most telling answer to the question of why sales people don’t use portals comes from asking yourself this simple question. How many portals have you felt inclined to log into lately?

There is your answer…

www.accountmaven.com

Push-Button Partnering

We have interviewed a bunch of people lately. Mostly sales types, some of them channel managers, some VP Sales, a few Presidents and heads of divisions. We have been asking them questions like:

• What do your sales people know about your channel partners?
• How many of your channel partners are actively pursuing new business for you?
• How important is channel revenue to your organization etc.

The answers all seem to be similar, and it does not seem to make much difference if they are from large organizations (100,000 employees) or tiny start ups with less than $10m in revenue. It seems obvious that there are big problems to solve in channel sales. Here are the problems:

1. Sales people have little knowledge or information about their channel partners
2. Most channel partners are under-performing
3. Lots of money continues to be invested in channel sales management, activation and recruitment
4. Its hard to find and recruit new partners
5. Its even harder to get them to perform
6. Sales people don’t like to use partner portals

We think that there should be a better way to set up and run your channel program. It should be simple, elegant, efficient and your channel partners should want to participate in it. You should only pay for it if it helps to grow your channel revenue. (success based billing).

We are calling it Push-Button Partnering.