PRM Best Practice: Collaboration

In the 1990?s and 2000?s, collaboration with channel partner networks centered squarely around plugging the gaps – either extending a vendors reach into geographic, vertical or horizontal markets or else utilizing channel partners as a means of augmenting a vendors capabilities where services were a key component of the solution required by the customer. In this way, vendors gained a more complete offering and were able to meet the needs of their customer wherever, whenever and however they were needed. Collaboration has taken many forms, the five key areas have been:

1. Professional services
2. Supply chain, logistics and distributed credit
3. Sales and pre-sales
4. Marketing
5. Post sales support services

Of the five, undoubtedly the most consistently well implemented has been collaboration in the provision of customer services. Starting first with break-fix warranty support by resellers themselves and then over time migrating to such work being carried out by large TPMs. Collaboration in logistics and credit distribution has matured such a that a relatively small number of global and regional distributors have taken the lion’s share of the market. Lucrative professional services has often been a source of channel conflict and sales and marketing collaboration has been less consistently well executed and typically with a number of stand-alone programs. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be looking at a range of programs that are amongst the most common, good and bad and considering their advantages and disadvantages for the vendors who implement them.

We’ll also be discussing the new partnering and collaboration paradigm; specifically the impact of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and Cloud Services in general upon the relationship between vendors and partners so stay tuned.