Automation to the Channel – Channel Playbook

As I have written before, Partner Marketing for the most part is awful or at the very least ineffective.

We live in a time for personalization or at the least list segmentation. We have online polls, access to Big Data and other tools to get better at marketing. However, nothing beats a conversation.

Three simple questions can help out any channel program:

What are you interested in hearing about?
What is the your primary business focus?
How do you see our company fitting into your portfolio?

In 20 years as an agent, I have had that conversation at most 3 times.

The problem lies in the underlying channel strategy: it is all about mass market. Let me break you of that notion. There is already an AT&T and a Verizon. You ain’t it. Figure out where you add value in the marketplace and explain that. Clearly.

Here are some stats for you: Cbeyond was one of the more successful CLECs. They only had 81K accounts. USLEC had 26K. Fusion (Birch) after 27 acquisitions has a grand total of 150,000 business customers.

Mass is not happening. Although 150K is a pretty large business.

The issue is the KPIs (key performance indicators). What KPIs are you looking at?

Is it the number of quotes? Sales/revenue numbers? Number of agent agreements inked?

Since the close ratio is less than 10% in most cases, the number of quotes is a nice number but shadows the fact that you are quoting haphazard. Fix the way you quote and what you quote, get less quotes in the funnel but the close ratio goes up.

I often hear that if a channel manager can talk to the end user, they can close 80%. Is that a KPI you track? Not yet I would imagine.

Sales numbers is a lazy KPI. Period. Daily sales activity results in sales. Track the activity.

Number of agents? This is a joke. Remember the Fog the Mirror jokes. We are back to that. I see press releases all the time with a ridiculous number of partners listed. Like this one:

It isn’t the number who sign; it is the number who ALIGN!

As more automation happens, open rates will decrease, partners will start using random emails to register for events and such. It comes down to partners didn’t give you permission (see spam or Seth’s book) for their attention. And likely they don’t trust you. But you need BOTH of those components – Trust and Attention – in order to have an aligned partner selling your stuff.

And that comes down to relationship. You can’t automate that. You will try. You will waste time and money – and you will fail.

You have to build a Brand that attracts partners. Sorry but that’s what winners do: Cisco, Datto, Microsoft, Dell.

Here’s another point about automation:

It is easier to automate things you can sell on Amazon. Ingram and Tech Data have had portals with online catalogs and real time inventory for 20 years. Product specs and details about stuff that is a commodity. This worked for POTS lines, PRIs, T1s, broadband and cell service, because those are mass market. Buyers understand them. They are essentially the same despite the provider.

Everything else you are selling – UC, SD-WAN, security, cloud services – is complex. It isn’t the same no matter who provides it. In fact, no two BSFT or Velocloud partners deploy It requires technical knowledge, consultative selling, complicated deployment and more. How do you automate that?

Heck, most employees of service providers can’t tell you what the company offers or what the value proposition is. Work on fixing THAT communication problem before you start automating the channel.