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:
- Sales people have little knowledge or information about their channel partners
- Most channel partners are under-performing
- Lots of money continues to be invested in channel sales management, activation and recruitment
- Its hard to find and recruit new partners
- Its even harder to get them to perform
- 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.
Posted by accountmaven 
