More and more when a Channel Manager is hired, there isn’t a lot of training. The on-boarding consists of the vendor portal, product portfolio and maybe the sales process. Everything else is on the job training. Sadly, the only expectation is production based on a couple of KPIs which are usually number of new partners signed and sales dollars.
James Anderson wrote a good article about CM churn. Yet the major reasons for churn for partner managers is lack of training and lack of fit.
Like partners who have had a long string of success selling voice and data, channel managers have had a similar streak – selling transactional, replacement products. In the CLEC hay day, the Integrated T1 was THE product for SMB. It provided some voice lines and some data. It was replacement at its peak. It replaced POTS. It replaced other T1’s. Today, up to 85% of orders at any TSB is for network.
Then you take that partner, who sells transactional products, and want him to sell cybersecurity or UC+CC, which are NOT replacements or transactions or a short sales cycle. Do you grasp the issue?
On the other side of that is the channel manager who also has spent 10-15 years helping partners order network – T1’s, Metro E, DIA, broadband, maybe some frame relay back in the day or an MPLS network or two. Now these CMs have to learn a new company, new portfolio, new systems, new culture, and find partners to sell the new. Unfortunately, it is rare that the old partners will switch for a lot of reasons. We saw this often when CMs who came out of cable went to UCaaS vendors. It wasn’t usually successful. The sales cycle and sales process are different than network.
All this is set against pressure due to a short runway. Most partner programs take three years to succeed, yet most partner program heads only last 20 months! Twenty months isn’t even enough time to plan strategy, hire chess pieces to execute the strategy and let the strategy play out. That’s one reason there is so much churn.
The other piece is that when word gets out that a vendor has a high pressure program, who wants to go work there? There is one UCaaS player who has an awful employment reputation due to random ass hiring and firing.
There is that debate about the Relationship sin the business. Let me describe it a different way: at any given time there are 3 sales being made simultaneously: the partner has to believe the CM; it has to trust the vendor to not only deliver the goods but to pay them; and it has to accept that the product will benefit the customer. At the same time, the Buyer has to trust the partner, vendor and product. A Brand like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, and Fortinet helps to bring some trust. An unknown vendor has an uphill climb here.
Even aggregators have a tough time against the Brands. And the cablecos now do aggregation!
People that don’t understand the channel or who maybe came from hardware, don’t really grasp these nuances.
The trust thing is even bigger when you want to sell to Enterprise. Ask 8×8, who struggled to sell to enterprise – and had to buy Fuze to beef up its Enterprise. Meantime, RingCentral had the hype machine pumping out the noise that they were the choice of Enterprise. If that were true, Microsoft Teams wouldn’t be sitting on 400M desktops.
As a vendor, you are asking the partner to trust you and then borrow the partner’s reputation to acquire a customer. That is a big ask. Even if I like the Channel Manager and we have worked together before, at a new vendor, the CM lacks domain knowledge; deep connections to get things done – like billing errors fixed, escalations on repair, and maybe customization.
The Channel Manager is the conduit to the vendor for the partner, but without training and a really good manager who can get things done, it is a chance to take.
This quote from James’ article: “On the other hand, the notion that the channel is all about relationships might miss the full picture, one source close to private equity told Channel Futures. This is the idea that the channel is only about relationships. If vendors are winning channel business solely because of existing relationships between channel managers and partners, what does that say about the value of the vendor’s product? On some level, there must be something about the vendor’s product or services that must motivate the advisor to recommend it. If that’s the dynamic, then the best channel managers do more than bring a relationship. They help the partner navigate the ecosystem of the vendor they work for, guiding them from quote-to-cash and advocating for them.”
That assumes that the vendor has a good product, which isn’t always the case. That also assumes what I just described: that the channel manager was properly trained and on-boarded and his manager has deep connections at the vendor. PE can make jumps like the product is great (or more likely on parity with the market) but unless they are sitting with Buyers, they don’t have a clue. Does the vendor have a reference account from the major verticals that can describe the outcomes clearly? Has marketing done its job?
BTW, he said the best channel managers – that isn’t all of them and that doesn’t necessarily mean they were great at Vendor T and will be great at vendor C due to the on-boarding, the program itself, the processes, the connections, and the domain knowledge. I don’t understand how the smart money guys don’t see that.
There are so many pieces to a successful program puzzle. And most programs are missing pieces. Most partners will just struggle through it for certain vendors – the big names and their favorites. But the process is pretty broken throughout. The CM is supposed to be there to help close those gaps or smooth things along, but when the CM is on the road, recruiting, on-boarding, selling and managing partners, there isn’t a lot of time to fix process issues.
This may sound mean but not everyone has 10 years experience; sometimes they have 1 year of experience 10 times.
The joke is we go to expos to see where people are working. Some CMs have spent 15 years with 7 different vendors. Some of it is timing, training, process, the program, the vendor and some of it is the CM himself. The way everything has changed in just 5 years, if anyone is still doing the same thing as six years ago, their success will be stymied. You have to keep learning in this industry.
Need Channel Manager Training? Call RAD-INFO Inc at (813) 963-5884, we have trained over a 1000 channel managers!
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