Providing channel partners with a means to register and track their own deals or leads with you is an excellent way of developing a holistic sales pipeline and forecasting process whilst minimizing channel conflict and potentially rewarding partner loyalty and transparency. Such programs fail for a variety of reasons:
- Lack of publicity
- Lack of incentive for the partner
- Inconsistent vendor behavior, disregard for incumbency and/or customer preference leading to greater channel conflict
- Partners able to register deals regardless of incumbency or customer relationship
- No win – no reward for the registrant regardless of whether the vendor wins the deal or not
Whether automating the process or not, you will have to think long and hard about workflow and business rules once more or else these programs can be costly failures and create a great deal of channel dissatisfaction. The rewards have to be worthwhile and attractive – for example – a partner registers a deal with you and drives the sale – the registrant could receive a reward even if the deal is ultimately won by a competing partner. All too often VAR?s lose interest when a low cost competitor wins a deal on price when the registrant put in all the work and the vendor refuses to pay out.
Deal registration must be quick, easy, accessible online and consistently executed by the vendor. It needs to be marketed continuously to your partners too otherwise interest and activity will fade.
A word of warning though, deal registration programs can be almost impossible to manage manually unless numbers of registrations are expected to be very small. The process of validation, incumbency checking, approvals, closure verification and reward remuneration can tie up significant administrative, sales and marketing resources very quickly and very easily.
Next week we’ll discuss subscription renewal programs.
