by channelmaven on January 30, 2010
I’m not sure if the economy truly is turning around but if the increased number of job openings for the channel is an indication, we are certainly on the road to recovery. In the past month, I’ve been asked for a valuable channel professional to fill an opportunity by at least a dozen companies. Is it that all areas of the IT market are rebounding or are good channel professionals just that hard to find?
I think it’s a little of both. While I can’t do anything to help the market rebound…other than shopping…here are some suggestions for finding or becoming a quality channel professional:
1. Remember ALL of your audiences: you don’t just have one customer like your corporate counterparts. You need to worry about the end-customer and their pain points that will drive sales of your company’s products as well as your partners and what will help them sell said products.
2. Find your joint value proposition: While your company may have the best widget in the world, your partners aren’t just going to promote that product without wanting to highlight their own value proposition as well. It’s important in any programs or support for your partners, that you make space for the JOINT value proposition. Your product with their services or your product with their product or your product with their product and services or….you get the idea.
3. Never create programs in a bubble: if you’re developing tiers, communications, incentives, or sales programs and you haven’t spoken to a partner in months…STOP. Get out there and talk to partners of all types and sizes. Surveys are also a great way to get a ton of feedback. If you’re looking to change your program entirely make sure that survey includes solution providers outside of your current eco-system.
4. Quality over Quantity: It’s funny to me when vendors brag about how many partners they have. Okay great! So from the partners’ perspectives there’s that much more competition. When recruiting be sure to get the right type of partners who will enhance and grow your business not just grow your number of partners. If you do have a ton of partners in one specialty or region, make sure each partner knows how they are going to be successful even with the large number of competitors.
5. Know your partners: similar to the first point it’s important to understand your partners and their business. If you make it a requirement that all partners run national integrated multi-touch marketing campaigns and 20% of your partners are tech geniuses but wouldn’t know an email campaign if they tripped over it, then no one is going to be successful.
It’s so important that channel professionals truly “get” the channel but with so many brilliant marketing, sales, and management people out there on the market I think the channel DNA is something that could and should be taught!
What do you think? Any success stories of turning a marketing/sales/management person from corporate into a channel guru?
by channelmaven on January 4, 2010
Influence Insiders 2010 – A Look Back
If you’ve heard the Influence Insiders BlogTalkRadio show you know that it is comprised of a group of industry professionals who get together and talk about trends and best practices as they effect different industries. The list of “Insiders” is below and we’d love to hear from all of you. This month we are taking a look back at 2010, that’s right we’ll be discussing what we think happened and how “we” as a whole dealt with it.
As Paul Hebert of I2I put it….You’ve just hit the first working day of 2010 and you may be a bit anxious about what the coming year will hold. But don’t worry. We at Influence Insiders are prepared to give you the down and dirty on 2010. Listen in this Wednesday, January 6 at Noon EST and hear what we worked on in 2010.
The Team
In no particular order:
- Ann Bares (Minneapolis): Managing Partner – Altura Consulting Group, author of the blog Compensation Force (a Workforce.com featured blog) and editor/contributor for multi-author blog Compensation Café and one of the Top 25 Talent Blogs as ranked by Fistful of Talent (FOT) – a popular talent management and HR focused blog. Ann has been a compensation consultant with RSM McGladrey, Inc., Riley, Dettmann & Kelsey LLC, and Watson Wyatt Worldwide.
- Frank Roche (Philadelphia): Partner iFractal – sponsor and contributor to very popular KnowHR blog. Frank and his team focus on helping their clients talk to their employees. In the past Frank led Mercer’s Human Capital Practice in the Netherlands and worked at Hewitt Associates.
- Heather Margolis (Boston): President Channel Maven Consulting – Prior to her current role Heather led channel programs for companies like EMC, EqualLogic, and Dell.
- Julien Dionne (Ottawa, CN): Julien authors the very informative blog leap.com and works with OpenSymmetry a consultancy that specializes in Sales Performance Management strategic planning, business process optimization, technology assessment and system integration engagements across diverse industries and software providers. He has worked with Accenture and nGenera prior to OpenSymmetry.
- Lance Haun (Portland, Or): Lance has a long history in the HR field and authors the highly rated and read blog YourHRGuy – now called Rehaul. He currently is VP Outreach for a company called Meritbuilder – an online employee reward/recognition portal with a unique feature of being portable – moving with the employee as they move.
- Todd Hanson (Appleton, WI): CEO of Catalyst Performance Group. Todd’s group is heavily into measuring the ROI of marketing and incentive/reward programs. They are currently measuring the ROI on the recent Motivation Show, works in partnership with the ROI Institute and he authors the blog called the ROI of Engagement.
- Paul Hebert (Greenville, SC): Managing Director I2I – author of Incentive Intelligence, contributor at Fistful Of Talent and general good guy. 20 years helping companies design and operate incentive, recognition and loyalty programs – degree in Statistics, worked on the Space Shuttle and B1 Bomber while employed at Rockwell and did a stint at a branding and corporate identity firm.
