An article by Ben Wong
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwongvt/
As a channel professional, you will need to ensure that your objectives are aligned with the leadership and sales teams in terms of revenue targets, product focus and market penetration. Last thing you want to have to show for all your team's effort is a channel ecosystem that is not designed to fully support management objectives.
Many companies hit markets with products based on revenue targets that direct the sales teams where to aim, fire and make their kills. In a channel setting, however, product maturity will determine how the ecosystem is setup. Let us take a look at an established company where the product lines are simply divided into core and advanced technologies.
Core technology is most often defined as products that have been around for a period of time and being resold by a number of partners having the competencies to sell / deliver / support with very little vendor involvement. In this instance, the channel leader will need to determine if there are enough partners to drive sales to a point where revenue meets or even exceeds targets. As for advanced technology products, sales / delivery / support should only be done by select partners with delivery in many instances falling back to vendor side professional services. Reason being that the products are either rather complex or so new that installation, configuration and integration is best left to the experts. Based on your product portfolio, you will probably need to further define varying maturity levels.
Step 1 - Divide your products out based on maturity to a point where it would be easier for you to decide what level of partner is able to fully manage which products and in what territory. Based on a 3 tier partner model - tier 1 partners are managed directly by the vendor, tier 2 partners by distributors while tier 3 consists of unmanaged partners pushing volume products. This is not cast in stone but gives you an example of partner tiering.
Step 2 - Based on historical sales, you know the average size per transaction for each product in your portfolio, it will then be very easy to calculate how many partners are needed per product once you factor in the number of transactions per partner and the intended revenue target. Add a percentage rate based on pipeline vs closure and you are well on your way to right sizing your channel ecosystem in terms of numbers.
Step 3 - Decide which partners will be managed directly, those that will go under distribution while the rest are left as unmanaged. Again, no hard and fast rule here.
For any channel ecosystem to be successful, it is imperative that you as a channel leader is able to guide your team in deciding how products are categorised relative to partner abilities and interests. By doing so, you will then be able to define the number of partners needed to support your business.
Wait! All we have done so far is to look at how many partners are needed from a technology standpoint. Our next step is to look at how different markets will affect the quality of partners that you select.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwongvt/
As a channel professional, you will need to ensure that your objectives are aligned with the leadership and sales teams in terms of revenue targets, product focus and market penetration. Last thing you want to have to show for all your team's effort is a channel ecosystem that is not designed to fully support management objectives.Many companies hit markets with products based on revenue targets that direct the sales teams where to aim, fire and make their kills. In a channel setting, however, product maturity will determine how the ecosystem is setup. Let us take a look at an established company where the product lines are simply divided into core and advanced technologies.
Core technology is most often defined as products that have been around for a period of time and being resold by a number of partners having the competencies to sell / deliver / support with very little vendor involvement. In this instance, the channel leader will need to determine if there are enough partners to drive sales to a point where revenue meets or even exceeds targets. As for advanced technology products, sales / delivery / support should only be done by select partners with delivery in many instances falling back to vendor side professional services. Reason being that the products are either rather complex or so new that installation, configuration and integration is best left to the experts. Based on your product portfolio, you will probably need to further define varying maturity levels.
How many partners do you need to support your business objectives?
Step 1 - Divide your products out based on maturity to a point where it would be easier for you to decide what level of partner is able to fully manage which products and in what territory. Based on a 3 tier partner model - tier 1 partners are managed directly by the vendor, tier 2 partners by distributors while tier 3 consists of unmanaged partners pushing volume products. This is not cast in stone but gives you an example of partner tiering.
Step 2 - Based on historical sales, you know the average size per transaction for each product in your portfolio, it will then be very easy to calculate how many partners are needed per product once you factor in the number of transactions per partner and the intended revenue target. Add a percentage rate based on pipeline vs closure and you are well on your way to right sizing your channel ecosystem in terms of numbers.
Step 3 - Decide which partners will be managed directly, those that will go under distribution while the rest are left as unmanaged. Again, no hard and fast rule here.
For any channel ecosystem to be successful, it is imperative that you as a channel leader is able to guide your team in deciding how products are categorised relative to partner abilities and interests. By doing so, you will then be able to define the number of partners needed to support your business.
Wait! All we have done so far is to look at how many partners are needed from a technology standpoint. Our next step is to look at how different markets will affect the quality of partners that you select.
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