Assess Your Channel Model Health!

In one of the episodes of the iconic American sitcom Beverly Hillbillies, the Clampett's believed they had a cure for the common cold. The cure turned out to be Chicken Soup and wait two weeks for the symptoms to go away. The channel operates similarly, we treat symptoms in hopes that the problem will go away but never address the root cause of the symptoms, the Opportunistic Fulfillment Model. What's an Opportunistic Fulfillment Model? It's an unstructured, free market, best effort, selling model where partners are never enabled to a selling strategy. Partner's are not provided a structured recipe and coverage plan to create new sales. The lack of structure leads to a number of core issues associated with fulfillment channels:

Revenue Growth- Opportunistic channel models create passive partners. For the average partner program, 20% of the partners are actively selling, generating most of the revenue. That leaves 80% of your partner community passively waiting for a request to quote before engaging.

Partnership Relevance- Every vendor solution is fighting for mind share with the partner seller against every solution in the partners' portfolio. Partner sellers naturally gravitate towards selling the easiest, most profitable solutions to sell. The opportunistic, unstructured channel approach leaves partner relevance to chance. Without equipping partners with a formula to create new demand, partner sellers’ often default to passive fulfillment. When partners start to passively fulfill, vendors never truly unlock the sales potential, mind share, and loyalty of the partner community.

Partner Enablement- Traditional partner enablement is focused on partner program compliance coupled with solution overviews. Rarely is enablement focused on organizing, educating, and equipping partner sellers to execute a solution sales strategy. In fact, the traditional enablement model requires the partner to translate product overviews into customer requirements in hopes of generating new opportunities. The focus on program compliance and product overviews often decouples channel enablement from the core selling strategy. This leaves Partner Managers executing checkbox enablement activities that never truly unlock the selling power of the partner.

Sales Execution- The opportunistic, unstructured fulfillment channel relies heavily on the vendor's sales teams to develop opportunities, while the partner seller manages the customer relationship and fulfills orders. Channel leaders are looking for ways to improve the top of funnel activity and win rates of their partners. In addition, channel leaders are looking to create better alignment between the partner community and their strategic sales teams, creating a better-balanced opportunity development model.

Channel & Partner ROI- The opportunistic, unstructured fulfillment model struggles to improve the sales efficiency of the partner community to generate greater revenue, improve win rates, and grow deal size. These challenges impact the profitability of the partner and your channel expense.?

As you read these core issues associated with the pervasive opportunistic channel model, you can probably relate to a few if not all of these issues. The good news is we can address each of these issues by adopting a data-driven structured performance model that will grow your channel revenue by 20%+ and improve your ROI using fewer channel resources. Want to know how your channel model stacks up and what the health of your model is to compete in today's competitive channel environment? Take the simple "Is your Model Money" assessment below.

Simple Channel Model Assessment

Here is a simple assessment to determine where your channel sales model fits on the spectrum of opportunistic fulfillment versus structured demand creation. The goal of this assessment is to determine if your channel sales model is optimized to win in today's environment? The below survey will score your channel model's readiness to optimize sales through your indirect sales channel and provides a health score based on the key at the end. Answer the following questions and score a point for each Yes. Add your total Yes count and use the key at the end to score the health of your channel:

1. Does your model develop customized channel sales plans by solution?
2. Are Partners trained to execute a sales strategy by solution?
3. Are Partners equipped with Sales Plays and Campaigns that walk the partner through a step-by-step demand creation process?
4. Do you use an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to identify high probability accounts to target with your Partners?
5. Does your model score accounts by ICP and Partner Relationship Strength to align Partners and Accounts?
6. Does your model teach partners to execute a structured prospecting methodology?
7. Are Partners equipped with email campaigns, call scripts and incentives to generate an initial customer engagement?
8. Are your Target Customers provided an option for a self-paced buyers journey for a solution as part of your Partner delivered Sales Campaigns.
9. Are your Channel Account Managers measured on the number of active Partner Sellers (who's actively prospecting) by quarter?
10. Are you capturing strategy execution activity at the partner seller level by campaign and account? (Can you answer what Partner X is doing to generate demand in account Y?)

Total your score and use the key below:

Fat Stack= If you scored 8 or greater, Congratulations! Your channel sales model is optimized, maximizing revenue for your solutions through the partner community. Your model is Money!

Small Stack= If your score is 6-7. Nice Work!?Your channel sales model is on the right track, incorporating many aspects of an optimized channel sales model.?There are still areas for improvement to fully maximize your channel model’s partner revenue generating potential, but your model is very good.

Pocket Change= If your score is 4-5. You are making progress!?Your channel model is on the right track, incorporating aspects of an optimized channel sales model.?There are many areas of improvement needed to maximize your channel model’s partner revenue generating potential, and your model is probably underperforming.

Chump Change= If your total is 3 or less. Your model needs work!?Your channel sales model fails to incorporate many aspects of an optimized channel sales model.?There are many areas of improvement needed to maximize your channel model’s revenue generating potential, and you are leaving significant revenue on the table.

Summary

If you're running an opportunistic fulfillment model, now is the time to address your channel GTM. The Chicken Soup and wait two weeks approach to address symptoms never truly solves the problems. Let's address the root cause, the opportunistic fulfillment model and replace it with a structured performance model. Channel Force Inc works with companies of all sizes to help maximize their channel revenue. We help channel organizations transition to a data-driven structured performance model. We are seeing tremendous adoption of the Partnerships 3.0 approach. If you would like to explore what a data-driven, structured performance model can do for your channel, please reach out to me at [email protected]. I would love to introduce the model and run a predictive analysis of your projected results. You will be glad you did!