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By Marc Metzner, Jim Stifler, Principals, The Alexander Group, Inc.
Agility is the key to managing your channels for maximum revenue-generation. Below is a virtual pre-flight checklist of the types of agility and speed that you need to have in place to make your channel strategy more effective. A Partner Relationship Management system is also a crucial element in facilitating channel agility.
In this age of increasing product choice and parity, the race goes to the swift. The battle goes to those service providers that can accurately target their value proposition to the rapidly shifting marketplace.
This agility lets you reach customers with your compelling message while your competition is still plotting strategy. Your company can achieve this by focusing on the five types of channel speed.
1. Speed to Market
With ever-shortening product life cycles, getting your product to the marketplace first is crucial. You can generate and lock in channel partner and buyer awareness and can capture the higher margins generated early in the product cycle. However, simply having channel partners does not create a true speed-to-market advantage.
You need a rapid communications tool, like an extranet, connecting you with your channel partner. This will enable you to quickly develop cooperative marketing programs, understand partner strengths, and utilize those strengths through targeted lead distribution. The goal is to get the customer first with the right message.
2. Provider-to-Partner Speed
You need to respond quickly to your channel partners' needs. Whether your partners require product or pricing information, support, channel conflict resolution, or just want to contact other partners for a specific opportunity, you need to respond in a useful manner as soon as possible. If not, partners will quickly focus their attention elsewhere.
3. Partner-to-Customer Speed
Once the customer is involved in the process, the importance of speed and agility increases. Today's customer is demanding of your partner value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators and agents; if they are to succeed, you have to help them respond more rapidly than your competitors' partners.
This produces faster responses to customer needs such as order status reporting, system implementation, trouble ticket management, and customer training options. In turn, this will rapidly win partner mind share and customer market share.
4. Virtual Solution Speed
Today's complex solutions require that you have several channel partners collaborating to target customer needs, and to design and implement solutions. You can quickly gain competitive advantage by making it easy for complementary partners to find each other and work together. The customer will rapidly see the benefits of this agility, creating a self-perpetuating circle of goodwill attention that attracts more partners and customers.
5. Speed in Performance Management
Because successful channel partners require significant investment of your time and resources, you must be able to quickly measure your return on investment (ROI) and take corrective action if necessary. If you have channel performance information at your fingertips, you can demand accountability, replicate best practices, and stop spending resources on failing channel programs and partners.
Developing the five modes of channel speed is essential to your company's ability to survive in today's markets. Developing the communications infrastructure/partner relationship management (PRM) system is a necessary component to building this competency. But, as is usually the case, leadership, the right partners, and the right products are crucial as well.
As leader of two of the The Alexander Group, Inc.’s consulting practices (Go To Market Sales Channels and Telecom), Marc Metzner oversees the firm’s thought leadership and methodology development in these areas. He can be contacted at 203-975-9344, ext. 585, or via e-mail at mmetzner@alexandergroupinc.com.
Jim Stifler can be reached at jstifler@alexandergroupinc.com.
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