You’re at this post, because something about your Channel Program isn’t working.  Regardless of the symptom, I suspect that the illness is Sales – your sales aren’t what you expected.  If I’m right, continue reading, if not thanks for stopping by.

Without knowing the specifics of your individual Channel Program, I can state pretty positively that the core reasons your program isn’t working is one or several of the problems below:

  1. You don’t really know how many partners you need and where you need them so you’re probably over-serving some markets and under-serving others.
  2. You’ve chosen the wrong partners so your team is spending time enabling partners who don’t have the ideal target partner characteristics you desire.
  3. You haven’t readied your partners to be successful.  This includes items like sales and marketing training, tools, templates, etc.  You are expecting your partners to do too much and you haven’t made it easy for them.
  4. You’re managing the Partners ineffectively so your Partners don’t know what to expect from you, they don’t know how they’re being measured, there’s no consistency or scale in your program so therefore you don’t have aligned goals with them.  This typically means all your efforts are sub-optimized because you’re working towards objective A and they’re working towards objective B.  You’ve got to get agreement with them on what you (as a team) are trying to accomplish together.
  5. Your program is missing core elements.  It could be the margins you offer are insufficient to gain partner share of mind.  It could be that you’re not investing in the channel marketing activities that have the highest ROI for you and your partners.
  6. Your organization isn’t aligned or ready to support your Partners or the channel program.  Are you measuring the right things?  Do you have tools that help your partners sell?  Are they good tools?  Do your partners use them?  Are you investing in the right areas?  It could be that you have channel conflict that is causing your Partners to invest elsewhere.

I’m not suggesting that the solution to these problems is easy.  What I am suggesting is that if you focus on addressing these key issues you will see increased sales from your partners.  It’s that simple.  Stay focused on the above, figure out where your problem is within the above and then put an action plan in place to address the issues.

If you need help, reach out to me.  I’ve got tools and templates that I’m happy to share.