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At least once a week a young marketer (aka: genius) working for an IT vendor calls me (aka: traditionalist) to ask if this old-timer can help them recruit new channel members. Here are the highlights of an exchange of calls. Day 1. Call 1. Recruit! Recruit! Recruit! Genius: So you guys publish eChannelLine Daily News? Traditionalist: Yes. Genius: How often does it go out? Traditionalist: Daily. Genius: Who does it go out to? Traditionalist: About 220,000 channel members. Genius: WOW. That's a lot of channel members. Traditionalist: Yes. Genius: Can we advertise in this publication? Traditionalist: Yes. Genius: How much does it cost? Traditionalist: Blah, blah, blah as I tell him about the weekly rates and that I will email him a rate card. Genius: So, eChannelLine goes out to 1.1. million channel people? Traditionalist: No, it goes out to 220,000 channel people. Ads are sold based on one-week bookings so these 220,000 channel people each receive your ad five times. That's how we get to the 1,100,000 recipients of your ad. Genius: Cool. I am going to need to buy a lot of ads. Traditionalist: Why? Genius: Cause I need to recruit a lot of channel partners. Traditionalist: Do you have a channel partner program? Genius: Yup. Traditionalist: How many channel partners do you have? Genius: Not sure. Probably about 8,000. Traditionalist: How many are active? Genius: What do you mean by active? Traditionalist: Have sold some of your product within the last 90 days? Genius: Don't know. Traditionalist: Can you please find out and then call me back? Day 4. Call 2. Recruit! Recruit! Recruit! Genius: The good news is that we have about 10,000 channel partners. Of these, 40 buy at least once every month. We then have another 100 who buy at least once every quarter. Traditionalist: So, how come the other 9,860 signed-up partners aren't buying from you? Genius: Don't know. Traditionalist: Are you sure you want to recruit new partners? Genius: Yup. Genius: To make our number I have to sign-up 5,000 new channel partners. Traditionalist: Maybe we should first find out why the 9,860 aren't buying? Genius: Why? Traditionalist: Maybe your money will be better spent educating, enabling, motivating and rewarding the 9,860 on who you are and what you do. It would also be great to find out why they are not buying from you. Genius: Sounds good, but I don't have a budget for research. Traditionalist: So, you just want to buy advertising space in eChannelLine? Genius: Yup. Traditionalist: Even if research would show you that the other 9,860 partners aren't buying from you because they don't think you care about them? Genius: No research budget. Traditionalist: So you want to launch a recruitment program? Genius: Yup. Day 26. Call 3. The Sales Are In The Bag. Genius: Hey, everything is going great. My boss is thrilled with the results from advertising with you. We have already signed up 1,800 new channel partners. That idea of giving them a top-of-the-line iPod just for signing up is really doing great. Traditionalist: How are sales going? Genius: Overall they are down this month by 14% over the comparative month for last year. But no problem. We just signed up with the three big national distributors for Canada and the US. This moves us from having five sales reps to over a thousand. My new sales forecast shows a 1200% increase in sales over the next 12 months. Traditionalist: What makes you think they are going to sell your product instead of the other 13 products similar to yours? Genius: Ain't you listening... its cause we have this dynamite partner program with almost 12,000 channel partners. All three distributors pretty much guaranteed that they would be able to sign up at least 2,500 new partners for our program, just based on the free iPods. This channel stuff is so easy. Traditionalist: How are you compensated? Genius: Base salary and a bonus based on how many channel partners I sign up. Why? Traditionalist: So, I guess you want to know how I can help you sign up more channel partners? Genius: Yup. During my 26-years of developing and implementing strategic channel marketing programs for about 350 IT companies I have met a lot of 'geniuses' and very few 'traditionalists'. I've watched the 'geniuses' rise to the top, fail, blame it on everyone else and then get hired by competitors who are impressed with results that have no bearing on overall objectives or ROI. Over the past 18-months, thanks to the new ChannelLine Advisory Council format, I have had the pleasure of meeting hundreds of 'traditionalists': people who understand the value that the channel provides and the obstacles that have to be dealt with when working with the channel. Hopefully, with the assistance of the Council members, we can develop a lot more 'traditionalists' and a lot fewer 'geniuses'. Together, we can create an industry that focuses on increasing ROI for all of the stakeholders, rather then developing an industry that is fixated on rewarding results that are easily measured but provide little or no value.
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