I am about to commit blasphemy in the eyes of channel model purists who tend to be suspicious of any (and I mean ANY) interaction between vendor salespeople and prospective/existing customers. Here goes: The concept that a company, ANY company, can be 100 percent channel-driven is a myth.

No, before you go rallying the lynch mobs, let me explain.

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the role of VARs as “trusted advisors” to their customers. (More on that in a future blog; a great VAR/solution provider executive that I know is actually publishing a book on this subject.) Let me suggest that we take the role of trusted advisor one step further: the job of any vendor channel account manager (CAM) is to be a trusted advisor to his or her partners. That means helping communicate the overall vision of the company they represent (this is a two-way dialogue by the way, since CAMs really should be feeding partner perspective back into their companies). It also means helping partners engage better with the person who REALLY matters the most: that would be the person who ultimately will use whatever stuff it is that’s being sold.

How can a CAM possible represent the customer’s point of view if they never call on existing or prospective customers?

Wendy Petty, vice president of North America sales for storage virtualization company Falconstor, says that in the current economy it’s more important than ever for VARs, CAMs and vendor sales teams to talk to potential buyers so that they can understand the same paint points that Falconstor and its partners are collectively trying to address. She personally spends half her time with partners and half her time with customer accounts. (You’ll notice that there is no “channel” in Wendy’s title.) “I believe that I need to understand what’s going. The heart of our business is the end user,” she says.

Sure, she gets plenty of other feedback via her partners, but this is straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Mind you, many of the calls she makes to customers are WITH Falconstor partners, which makes all the difference from a trust perspective. By the way, Falconstor just hired 7 new sales people to support its field engagement efforts (there are about 30 or so total).

The key to making this work is transparency, some well-established ground rules about account ownership, and a little blind faith. It also helps if you have a discrete number of partners to manage. (Falconstor is focused on about 120 or so).

Personally speaking, especially in the existing economic climate, the vendors and partner ecosystems that will do the best are the ones that keep sniping and subterfuge to a minimum and keep focused on what the buyer needs. In that sense, you can’t just rely on either a vendor sales person OR a channel partner to get things done. This environment will test the notion of partnership and I’m betting we’ll come out the other side with a vastly reconstructed view of what it means to be “channel-centric.”

I was grateful for the opportunity earlier this month to catch up with Mike Gerentine, vice president of global channel and solutions marketing at IBM. I hadn’t heard much about IBM’s channel program focus in the past six to nine months, and was looking for a few highlights, which he was gracious enough to share. Here are a few things that caught my ear:

• Plan globally, execute regionally. IBM’s worldwide program framework is squarely focused on several core technology solution areas, including virtualization, green IT and data center consolidation; the vendor’s channel teams will be empowered much more at the regional level to make these initiatives theatre-specific. This isn’t really new, but it’s significant given the state of various world economies. If you’re a multinational VAR reading this blog, you’re likely to have more luck with winning market development funds in growth markets than you will in North America. For the vendor channel managers reading this, it’s another reminder that what plays well in the United States won’t necessarily apply in Brazil or Russia or India. So, let leaders in those regions set the channel agenda—just make sure it plays to your high-level program messaging.

• Reward cross-portfolio solutions liberally. Watch developments around IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center initiative. The IBM channels team developed the program WITH some key IBM Business Partners over the summer and “officially” launched it in October. It emphasizes and rewards attach-rate behavior that pulls cross-branded IBM solutions into the data center domain and plays to the huge data center transformation that is happening across enterprise and midmarket accounts. So, VARs that represent the whole shebang: IBM hardware, software and services will find themselves in the catbird seat. In fact, some IBM Business Partners may even be able to snag up to $100,000 in business develpment funds to support this IBM priority. Here are more details on the whole initiative.

• Seek loyalty. IBM’s new data center program points back to the one BIG thing that vendors REALLY need from their channel partners in a whack-o economic climate like this: LOYALTY. I’ve heard some VARs describe the current environment as a “take share” market, meaning they aren’t going to see incremental revenue so much as share shifts from accounts that MUST upgrade their infrastructure. It will be bloody. So, it’s in every vendor’s interest to make sure it is as strategic (read profitable) in the minds of their existing partners as possible. For IBM (and Hewlett-Packard for that matter), that translates into rewarding the VARs and resellers that invest in pushing as much of their entire portfolio into an account as possible. It also means keeping the process around deal registration, competitive bid resolutions, special support requests and business development as simple as possible.

What’s on your mind for 2009? To chat about your company’s channel program strategy (warning, you might show up on this blog!), contact Heather Clancy at hclancy@swotmg.com.

After months of writing about practical applications for Web 2.0 technologies and services, I have to admit, I really hate the term because it’s one thing that’s really keeping IT solution providers from exploiting its benefits.

Why not, instead, talk about the essential business processes that things like social networks and blogs really enable? That, to me, is the best way to help VARs and resellers recognize and consider the potential business benefits that these concepts can provide.

Given that smaller VARs are notoriously slow to adopt the very same technology they represent, how do I know your own channel will respond to this mindset? Well, it certainly resonated with the VARs and resellers that attended the two panels about Web 2.0 that I was hired to handle during the Ingram Micro VentureTech Invitational earlier this month. I was asked to handle two workshop sessions there: A presentation that discussed potential practical sales and marketing applications for social networks and blogs, and a panel that explored how some VentureTech members are actually using Web sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn at their companies.

While it’s hard to take notes while you’re presenting, here are a few things that stuck with me. Broadly speaking, they all have something to do with the following concepts: Collaboration, Community and Conversation. You’ll get what I mean in a moment.

1) Social networks will reshape tech recruiting. All of the VARs on my Invitational panel (Heartland Technology Solutions, i-Tech Support and The Lloyd Group) are using social networks to find and vett job candidates. They trust the referrals that they’re getting out of these communities. What’s more, they can do a little discreet research to assess whether or not a potential hire will fit in with their company culture.

2) If you want to really engage with anyone under the age of 30, you need to get savvy about social networks. There have been a few research reports out in the past month that point to the obvious. Forrester Research just released a report that reveals only 10 percent of adults from the age of 18 to 24 DO NOT participate in social networks or blogs. If you want to market to the next generation, you need to consider how to use social networks. Well, this applies in business, too. Want feedback on a new strategy or product? Don’t expect a meeting to uncover everything. Start a wiki or use a more formal collaboration tool like SharePoint to facilitate an online dialogue. Heartland encourages this, primarily among its technical types.

3) Let your employees help create your culture on social networks. Set guidelines, but don’t dictate. In a move that you could definitely call experimental, The Lloyd Group has created several subgroups for its company within Facebook, including one for former employees. Adam Eiseman, the CEO, says this helps his staff feel more connected at a personal level, building more empathy for each person’s individual role and contributions to the company.

4) Blogs could be a great way for VARs to establish their identity. i-Tech Support is one of several VARs that I know who have set up blogs to represent its point of view on topics of the day. i-Tech’s Richard Vaughn, who has championed this effort, says the hardest thing has been to keep up with the updates (you need to update it now, Richard!). But the blog has had the effect of bringing new prospects to his company via search engines. This other link shows you what one VAR peer group is doing with blogging.

What can vendors and distributors do to support these sorts of activities?

Some, such as Ingram, have set up gated communities such as The Zone, which is essentially an online extension of the Invitational events, meant to perpetuate face-to-face conversations that start at its events. Others are facilitating collaboration activities. An example is Partner Exchange, launched in April by Cisco and intended to help solution providers looking for potential business partners from among their peers.

One area where I think immediate adjustments should be made relates to the sorts of marketing activities your company might consider funding.

If you haven’t begun supporting proposals that include non-traditional components related to Web 2.0, maybe it’s time to start doing so. From your standpoint, you may be able to measure the return on your investment. Better yet, why not proactively encourage your partners to get on board, especially as it relates to two areas: supporting better internal collaboration through various Web 2.0 applications and facilitating more effective marketing dialogues and demand generation activities through both blogs and social networks. I’m still thinking this on through, myself.

Got any thoughts to share? Comment on this blog and get the conversation started. You can also visit me on FaceBook or LinkedIn, or email me directly at hclancy@swotmg.com.

If you think you don’t have enough insight into what your high-tech channel partners are doing on your behalf, you are not alone. Almost three-quarters of those recently surveyed by Aberdeen Research said they lack visibility into partner performance and 84 percent are considering investments in channel management over the next 12 to 24 months.

These are two of the findings cited in Aberdeen’s report, Channel Sales: Renaissance in Channel Management. And here’s where I need to make the obligatory disclosure that this study was underwritten, in part, by SWOT Management Group subsidiary Channeltivity, which sells a partner information management application that’s offered up in SaaS form. So, I’ll stick to citing the basic facts of the study, and I’ll leave the assumption-making to you.

I should note, then, that when channel managers talk about wanting visibility, more often than note, they’re talking about wanting to know what deals a partner is working as well as which leads they are following up on. At least according to Aberdeen. Those organizations that the research house considered best-in-class, as an example, report that they are using partner relationship management applications (89 percent), lead referral systems (59 percent) or lead tracking tools (55 percent) to keep tabs on the activities of their VARs and resellers.

Personally speaking, I think there should be a whole lot more to a partner-vendor relationship than simple pipeline check. Better profiling, in my opinion, is the best place to start. Chances are, you can get your partners selling more for you if you understand what else they are selling. Visibility always seems way too product-oriented for me, but I’ve always been kind of naïve that way. Anyway, if you’re trying to get a better handle on your own priorities, you might want to read the report, which can be found at this link.

You might also want to revisit the results of the Forrester Research study that I blogged about a couple weeks back, as it provides a sense of what else is on your peers’s minds.

The best channel managers are those that can envision themselves standing in the shoes of their best VARs. And, honestly, vice versa. But all too often, channel managers forget that solution providers have businesses of their own to run, while solution providers find that the proverbial glass slipper offered by their vendor partners doesn’t fit quite as well as they’d like.

Forrester’s recent channel trends report, introducing a new benchmarking tool for partner programs that it hopes to sell to vendors, is a classic illustration of this disconnect. (Information about the Forrester service and the related report can be found at this link.) Nowhere is the gap more profound than when it comes to sales and marketing programs. Simply put, the 20 vendor executives surveyed by Forrester for the benchmarks think that partners do an average job, at best, when following or participating in the various programs they provide. To illustrate, consider a quick recap of the following question: “Please rate your partner’s performance in the following sales and marketing activities.” A result of 5 indicates “Excellent” and a mark of 1 indicates “Poor.” Here are the mean responses for each activity:

Participation in lead/deal registration program – 3.3
Selling “solutions” to business problems (as opposed to product features) – 3.3
Conducting marketing activities – 3.1
Selling to business decision-makers (not technology decision-makers) – 3
Leveraging the sales and marketing collateral and tools that you offer to them – 3
Nurturing and closing leads that are supplied by the vendor – 2.7
Reporting the results of marketing campaigns – 2.3

My colleagues over at the TechTarget channel group actually went out and surveyed some VARs about the survey results. The results of their reporting can be found at this link. The biggest bones of contention, of course, surround motivations for deal registration as well as the ever-classic, chicken-and-egg argument over lead generation. Vendors are irked that resellers don’t follow up their leads, while resellers are irked that many of the leads they are given are not only weeks old but woefully unqualified. This debate will continue into eternity.

Another finding that really ticked me off, actually: Half of the people surveyed by Forrester felt that it wasn’t important to solicit partner feedback about their programs? That’s really a bad attitude. Granted, you shouldn’t necessarily change something on the whim of one partner. But if you don’t know what your partners think about you, it’s a whole lot easier for a competitor to go find out and then use that information against you.

To be fair, the vendor channel execs also rated themselves along a number of metrics and they didn’t exactly ace this thing either, although they scored themselves higher than they scored their partners. Here are the average scores the vendor execs gave themselves for different elements of program management. Again, a score of 5 means “Excellent” and a score of 1 means “Poor.” I’m providing the mean results for each area. Here goes:

Marketing program management – 3.8
Partner management – 3.6
Partner sales management – 3.6
Partner communications – 3.5
Partner recruiting and administration – 3.5
Partner training – 3.3
Partner collateral management – 3.3
Partner profiling analysis – 2.7

Finally, if you’re a channel manager wondering where your peers are going to concentrate their partner enablement activities over the next year, here’s the top response: Enabling partners to sell to business decision-makers. This response received a rating of 4.1. Two other priorities tied for second place: Fostering partner-to-partner community and collaboration (3.6), and Providing partners with marketing skills training (3.6).

All I can say is: Lots of work to do all around. Here’s hoping these vendor execs use dialogue and debate with their partners to help drive their strategy.

First, let me say that I never ever have been a channel manager nor have I ever tried to sell technology solutions to put food on my table. But I have interviewed scads of smart people from all parts of the high-tech channel and feel beholden to share what I have learned and heard.

I get the sense that one of the most controversial topics you can introduce to a channel account manager OR a solution provider business manager is the concept of joint business planning. Some people associate it with all sorts of paperwork, which then lives in a document somewhere gathering cyber-cobwebs, while others give it almost too much weight, expecting a one-time session to solve underlying process issues or disconnects. I prefer to think of it, instead, as the underlying dialogue informing a healthy relationship between a VAR and one of its strategic suppliers.

I wouldn’t dream of telling you what the best business plan format is for you and your channel partners. Because, after all, this is something that needs to be pertinent to YOUR and THEIR business. But SWOT Management Group believes that there are four fundamental principles underlying any successful joint business planning process. These are.

• VISION
• COLLABORATION
• TRUST
• RESULTS

A moment on each of these concepts.

VISION is, in effect, your guidance system for the partnership. There are two big things you need to focus on here, Disclosure and Buy-in. In the disclosure process, you need to discuss joint expectations, the investments required on both sides (in terms of people and hard costs) as well as the way “success” will be measured. During this phase, you should insist on a formal planning session, one that includes key executives from both the partner and the vendor’s management team. Without that buy-in, the plan could be doomed at the field execution phase.

COLLABORATION refers to your ability to create an information-sharing culture, in which knowledge is shared transparently between the partner and the vendor’s field team. A communications breakdown could impede progress. To make this thing work, you have to think like one big team. Way harder than it sounds, I know.

Successful collaboration leads to TRUST, which in turn leads to better collaboration. Chicken-and-egg style. According to an article published in the Harvard Business Review, those resellers that had a high degree of trust in their manufacturer partners contributed 78 percent more sales than those who had a lower level of trust. The trust factor correlates directly with financial performance, effectiveness of field execution and resource allocation.

RESULTS could come in a number of different forms, only you can set the agenda there. But a good business plan could do any or all of the following: Drive your sales scale, improve your field execution or grow your revenue.

None of this is stuff you don’t already know. But since many of you just started a new fiscal year, it might be a good time to revisit these simple ideas. Any thoughts?

First, a confession. I have always had mixed feelings about home-grown partner relationship management (PRM) tools. In my mind, for any reseller or VAR nurturing more than one relationship with a high-tech vendor (i.e., um, most of you) they represented an incredible investment in administrative resources. Imagine having to keep four or five of these things up-to-date. Especially if they all looked and acted different.

Now that I have grown wiser (and I guess older, too, ugh), I have a different opinion about what used to be called the PRM category, especially for any VAR that has tied themselves closely to just a couple of key high-tech suppliers.

For one thing, the growing acceptance of Software as a Service has made the user interfaces to these applications a whole lot more logical to use and easily accessible for both the partner’s and the vendor’s field sales personnel when they need it in real selling situations. Plus, the smarter high-tech companies have chosen to tie them more closely to the “real” data stored in their sales pipeline management systems. Rather than locking their partners out.

The best tools in the category have really morphed into what you’d call Partner Information Management solutions. These applications offer value to both sides of the high-tech channel, both VARs and vendors. The new Channeltivity 3.0, developed by SWOT Management Group’s partner company Channeltivity and being launched on June 11, demonstrates what I’m talking about. Disclosure: This software is obviously sold by the company that I work for, so I have a vested interest in making sure it’s successful. The feature set was informed and conceived by several executives that have bona fide channel field sales and management experience, including Channeltivity COO Gary Grimes, the former head of channel programs for Sun Microsystems.

What makes Channeltivity different from other software in the Partner Information Management category is its focus on engagement and execution, with features that span a partner’s lifespan with a particular vendor all the way from initial recruitment and onboarding, to business planning and the subsequent management of a sales pipeline.

All of this can be managed from a single place: you don’t have to go to five different places to get a grip on important data points. Channeltivity 3.0 is, in essence, a collaboration tool one that links a vendor channel team with a partner’s sales and marketing team.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so For a demo of how Channeltivity works, check out this link. Or e-mail info@channeltivity.com to talk to someone about specifics. You’ll have to listen to me blab on some more about specific features, but I promise it will get you thinking. More important, Channeltivity 3.0 will help your channel team get a better grip, across individual partners, specific regions or your entire channel. It’s your choice.