4 Key Things to Consider When You’re a Channel Leader

Find Your Next Trophy Partner

One of the biggest challenges you will face as a channel leader is digging through those large channel haystacks and finding the buried needles. You have to be ruthlessly efficient when identifying the partners that are the diamonds in the rough and the partners that are overperforming relative to their expectations. Whether you’re managing tens or tens of thousands of partners, our BI tools help you create unlimited visuals to enhance out-of-the-box dashboards to get a segmented distillation of partner data and sift through the pretenders and find the true contenders within your partner program.

Provide Partner Value

Channels are almost always understaffed, relative to their counterparts in the direct-side, and even more so as we deal with the current climate. The entire premise of the channel is about leverage, doing more work with fewer people, and leveraging the least amount of internal resources as possible to get as much externally as you can. In the channel space, we have to be extremely data-driven and aware of what collateral is being consumed, which assets and training are helping partners and what’s not working. Channel chiefs don’t want to dig for information, they want to easily see what is on the menu that will benefit them. With Channel Intel+ you have the ability to organize visuals into personalized dashboards and reports. These reports are useful to schedule on an interval that you specify to send to internal stakeholders or even easily serve your partner a plate with no garnishes.

Allocate Your Resources

In the channel, you’ve most likely seen a numerator at best, we don’t ever see a denominator in terms of evaluating a partner’s performance. We tend to prioritize our time and allocation of resources based on which partner makes the most noise. Stop actions like handholding and babysitting partners by making data-driven decisions and truly optimizing your decision on who should get the resources. Who should be getting these important leads and who will turn those leads into major sales? Human-driven decisions can be replaced by data-driven decisions with Channel Intel+, enhanced partner data helps you clearly find the best and most effective partners in your program.

Understand the Journey

You’ve got to understand the path that your partners are taking and truly understand the effectiveness of the tools being given to them. You’ve built a large digital presence for them and the follow-through for that is key, you have to see what path they’re following, and which paths lead to the most successful results. Everyone’s goal is to provide partners with a path to success, the fewer paths you provide to your partners, the less navigating and less confusion. When partners enter your channel, every door should be locked except for the one they’re supposed to go through; no need for partners to plan their own strategy, their own game plan, and assemble their own tools. Leverage our BI tools to reinforce the partner journey, remove any unnecessary noise, and reroute your partners so that they are provided a path that’s proven to succeed.

Leave it to the experts at Impartner and our new business intelligence tool, Channel Intel+, to truly drive partner revenue, profitability, and actionable and crucial insights into partner performance – all through an easy-to-use user interface. Our solutions are not only our customers’ most powerful secret weapon, they are easy to adopt, quick to deploy, and fully customizable for your brand. If you’d like to learn more about how Impartner can strengthen and transform your channel today, visit impartner.com/demo.