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January 30, 2008

RESOLUTIONS FOR 2008: Leverage Channel Data to Achieve Greater Success

30 January, 2008
By Mark Geene, CEO at InfoNow

You're looking to achieve bigger and better business results this year, including improving processes, reducing costs and increasing profits. It's an admirable goal; and an achievable one, if you've got the right access to your channel data. As I've discussed in my last two articles, gaining a better understanding of your channel partners can help you refine your marketing and sales operations and maximizing revenue opportunities. And knowing your end-customers is critical to planning and forecasting as well as product development.

With a rich source of reseller, distributor and end-customer data, companies have the channel insight they need to support sales and achieve business goals.

Let's take a quick review of information discussed during the last two weeks. Properly identifying distributors and resellers is the most critical component of segmenting and analyzing partner sales and success. There are five key steps to identifing resellers and distributors:

Standardize and consolidate partner data to eliminate duplication
Assign unique identifiers to cleansed records
Establish hierarchies
Link back to original data
Regularly maintain sales data

Once you have made the effort to truly understand your channel partners, it will become easier to gain additional insight into end customers. The three key steps to capture end-customer data are:

Provide incentives to partners to provide point-of-sale data with end-customer information
Eliminate duplication and enrich the information with third-party reference data, such as industry segment, revenue, employee size, and hierarchy details
Match end-customer data to the sales channel repository to close the loop between partner and end-customer data

With this complete picture of partner and customer data, you can now use the information to understand sales by market, by product, and by partner. Segmenting your channel in this way will help identify which partners are performing well, in which markets and with which products, as well as those that are struggling in certain areas - information that will help you determine where you want to invest time and budget, as well as what type of incentive programs will drive the best results. Let's explore an example.

Increased Channel Insight Helps Software Company Exceed Revenue Growth Targets
A leading infrastructure software company with 35,000 channel partners struggled with multiple reseller databases that contained a significant amount of inaccurate, incomplete or duplicate data. In addition, the company's manual processing of point-of-sale (POS) data did not capture all available details on resellers and product sales so it was impossible to know how resellers had been performing on a country-by-country or product-by-product basis.

The company followed the processes to accurately identify its resellers and distributors, and effectively cleansed and organized its partner data. Next, the company used POS data from partners to pinpoint its end-customers and learn who was using which product; and then enriched the data with information, such as company size and vertical market.

Having this access to channel information helped the company segment its partners and identify where they were successful, such as in which markets or with which products. The company then used this information to create channel rebate programs that were aligned with its growth objectives. Because the rebate programs were tailored to leveraging the existing strengths of the partners, more partners participated in the new programs than before and were more successful in their efforts - helping the company exceed its 20% revenue growth objectives.

This is just one illustration of how the complementary processes of identifying channel partners and end-customers, and segmenting a partner base, create a strong foundation for supporting sales and achieving business goals. Many companies are discovering how increased channel insight can be used to make more strategic business decisions, gain a competitive advantage, and increase the bottom line.

Fortunately, channel visibility is more accessible today than ever before. Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] offerings are available to deliver this information quickly and easily, without investing in hardware and software and the associated IT resources. Even better, these solutions can be deployed and provide valuable insight in as little as a few days.

By bringing your products to market, channel partners such as distributors and resellers play a critical role in your success. Segmenting and analyzing those partners will help you ensure the success of those partners - a strategy in which it is clearly worth investing - and will ultimately increase your company's success as well.

RESOLUTIONS FOR 2008: Better Understand Your Partners to Improve Their Success
RESOLUTIONS FOR 2008: Get to Know Your End-Customers

Mark Geene has been with InfoNow Corporation, the global leader in channel visibility solutions, for over 4 years. He has more than 20 years of channel sales, business development and operations experience and has held sales management and executive positions at IBM, Oracle, Tenfold Corporation and Dorado Software.

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