Let’s begin to drill into specific channel process areas from a Best Practices perspective. After all, it’s easy to talk about Best Practices at the high level, but the real benefits come from implementing change in very specific ways. Channel partner management is a great example. Partner processes encompass everything from reporting sales and inventory data, to securing, on-boarding and managing new relationships. As a result, there are Best Practices that drive automation and simplification for cost savings, and others that drive partner loyalty and retention for increased revenue growth. Let’s examine a few representative ones:
Best Practice Best Performance
- “Stocking” partners reporting POS and Inventory data 100% Reporting Daily
- Automated reporting methods to reduce partner burden 100% automated reporting
- Timely measurement and sharing of partner performance goals Daily visibility of partner achievement
On the surface these seem pretty simple, but if you don’t have the proper infrastructure try achieving daily, automated POS and inventory reporting from your channel partners. Not so easy is it? Daily sales and inventory visibility has plenty of cost savings impacts like reduced stock-outs, increased inventory turns through the channel, and accurate end customer identification. And automation ROI can be measured in the reduction of FTEs required to manually collect, identify, correct and analyze all of the data.
But what about the promise of revenue growth? Well, let’s think of the effects of partner performance measurement and sharing. If you could identify both your best and worst performing partners so you know whom to reward, and whom to correct or drop, do you think you could drive more channel revenue from those partners? In fact Research shows that these Best Practices can increase revenue between 5 and 10%. That’s millions of dollars to the bottom line.
