Is Your Technology Inhibiting Your Growth?

Technology – or lack of the right technology – can be the difference between growth and stagnation. When systems are lacking and workflows uncharted, you spend more time coaxing information out of spreadsheets and emails than creating growth.

Here are three signs your technology is holding you back from growing your channel:

1. Your Partner Channel Manager Spends Most of His Time Fielding Partner Requests

Channel managers should be primarily engaged in growing the channel. While taking care of partners is an important part of that, most of the time what your partners really need is easy access to things that will help them sell successfully – data sheets, quick deal registration, etc. To grow the channel, a partner portal will enable you to focus on the priorities that can’t be delivered via self-service.

And it’s what partners prefer too. They don’t want to spend valuable selling time sending emails to you to get what they need. They will instead focus their time on vendors that give them what they need quickly so they can get back in front of customers.

If your partner relationship management (PRM) technology is a collection of spreadsheets and emails, your process is far more labor intensive than necessary. With PRM software, Channeltivity included, tasks like deal registration, lead distribution and partner portal management become highly automated.

1. You Don’t Know Who Your Most Effective and Engaged Partners Are

Sustainable growth requires identifying which partners have the most success with your product and recruiting more of the same. Partners’ strengths and weaknesses, who and where they serve, their core competencies – you need to have data on all these things, and that data needs to be tied to partner performance.

Ultimately, you need to be able to identify your most effective and engaged partners so you can replicate them. And like fielding partner requests, the process should be mostly automated. Channeltivity’s channel partner dashboard makes it easier and faster to recruit more effectively. It tracks partner performance in one easy-to-access screen, enabling you to quickly identify partner characteristics most correlated with sales success so you can scale your program with a focus on high value partnerships.

With that insight, a channel manager can make better choices with lead distribution. Knowing who the rock stars are, he can pass leads to the people who are going to close the business and do it most efficiently. Partner profiles and analytics also allow you to identify and run more of the programs that most successfully enable partners to better promote your solution.

1. You Aren’t Able to View Trends

You can’t control what you can’t measure – and you can’t measure what you can’t see.  If you can’t go back 12, 24 or 36 months to analyze past performance, how can you plan for and support future growth?

But if your channel partner management data tells you, for example, that Q3 is always the strongest closing quarter of the year, you can make plans to take advantage of that.  You can allocate more marketing dollars in Q2 to drive more traffic to your site as companies begin looking at solutions.

And if your technology doesn’t give you insight into current deals, you likely have another drag on growth: channel conflict. With multiple partners selling to the same opportunity, it’s harder for them to be successful with your product and they’re likely to move on to other products that are easier to sell. When partners can’t easily register and update deals, you also lack continuous updates as to what direction the deal is moving in.

Investing in Good Technology Legitimizes Your Program

Investing in technology designed specifically for channel management shows the vendor’s commitment to partners and the success of the channel. It inspires confidence in partners that you’re going to make it easy for them to close as much business as possible. It makes it clear to them – and your executive team – that there’s strategic value in your program.

by Channeltivity

Is Your Technology Inhibiting Your Growth? is a post from: CRM Software Blog

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