Our earlier discussions of Partner Relationship Management centered on “starting the engine” and “gaining traction”. Now we look at “tuning for performance”, making the most of the investment in collecting reported POS and Inventory data from the channel.

For many high-tech OEM vendors who are in the early stages of collecting POS and Inventory data for matching, program calculations and – ultimately – business decision-making, the initial foray is followed by a “tune-up” to adjust some settings on the machine for better performance. What do I mean? Many of our clients have, for years, been collecting “what they could get” from channel partners. With different types of distributors, multiple regions, different product lines… the result is a collection of reports from different systems, in different formats, containing different data elements.

Collecting, compiling, cleansing, normalizing and performing matching and calculations on this data is a chore – time and resource intensive and more than a little frustrating.

It makes sense to revisit what’s coming from whom, how often, in what format, with what kind of completion and accuracy. A Channelinsight Quarterly Business Review is a great forum for circling up the teams from the client and Channelinsight who envisioned, designed and launched the program, for an inspection of progress and results, and to decide how to “fine-tune the settings” for optimal results.

While the beauty of the SaaS product coupled with facilitated on-boarding of reporting partners does provide a certain “set it and forget it” capability, there is often a need for some preventative maintenance and performance tuning. Keys to both include visibility and communication.

Visibility: during the heavy-lifting phase of on-boarding reporting partners, there is a LOT of information at any given time about who is in what stage of the process, what step comes next, what’s stuck and why, etc. Providing dashboard visibility to progress has proved very helpful to many of our clients. This is especially true in the beginning phases of a project, where the value proposition of an expanded and enhanced channel data collection and processing venture has a high degree of interest and scrutiny.

Communication: the companion to visibility, communication is KEY not only in the beginning but throughout the engagement, and it takes many forms. Progress reports, proactive reminders and post-event notifications are key factors that keep the process operating at peak efficiency.

The bottom line? It is possible to have success designing, launching and performance tuning a robust channel partner data-reporting program! Focus, energy and partnership with experts in the space will enable a solid start, sustained momentum and increased performance over time, enabling rapid, high-confidence decision making.

The high tech industry has a plethora of best practices.  There are best practices on how to manage your supply chain, procure product, market and sell your products and just about every process we have.  Along with that, there are countless consultants who base their entire business on benchmarking and delivering best practices to their clients.  In fact, for years I ran the professional services team at a consulting company, iSuppli where providing best practices to the semiconductor industry was my bread and butter.

Best practices are very compelling.  Something at your company is not working well; let’s see what is working well for others.  Sounds simple enough but the challenges are numerous:

1. What exactly is the best practice?
2. How do I implement a best practice when I am not familiar with it?
3. If everyone else is doing this, do I want to follow or try to lead with something new?

Over the years I have read in leading strategy books that it can be dangerous to rely exclusively on best practices.  Michael Porter warns that “few companies have competed successfully on the basis of operational effectiveness over an extended period, and staying ahead of rivals gets harder every day.  The most obvious reason for that is the rapid diffusion of best practices.”

So does that mean that we should not rely on best practices and look to establish our own practices?  Not necessarily.  Michael Porter is saying that Best Practices should be quickly understood and integrated into an organization but differentiated strategies need to be built on top of these best practices.

This is especially true in the high tech channel.  I am always impressed by the number of innovative channel incentive and training programs that are created to build partner loyalty and trust.  And why not?  Our research indicates that for many companies the majority of their revenues, sales growth and profit come from the channel.  What surprises me is that all to often the key building block of this innovation is lousy data.

Channelinsight collects, standardizes and enriches channel point of sale and inventory data.  I am amazed that well run, multi-billion dollar companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on channel incentive, discount, training, and marketing programs and cannot measure the impact of this spending, or even the overall trends in their channel.  One of our customers recently said, “We are paying out over $500 million a year in the channel based on rumor and innuendo!”

High tech companies can differentiate themselves with innovative channel strategies, but these must be built on channel data management best practices.  There are proven, effective, methods to collect and analyze channel data; why utilize substandard practices and base your innovation on missing, bad or very old data.

The key to successful implementation of best practices is to implement proven processes that provide the framework and flexibility to support true innovation.  After all, the real best practice is that which makes you and your customers successful.