I took over as CEO of InfoNow about 5 years ago. The company was providing custom solutions to big channel problems. We’re still solving big channel problems but now we are doing it through a true multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. We’ve become the leading channel sales management solution and the first channel sales management solution in the cloud. We’ve raised $21 Million in capital over the past few years that we have invested in developing and building our product. The benefit of a cloud-based solution is that it is available to companies large and small, without costly infrastructure or resource investment, as a subscription based service. We’ve changed dramatically over the past few years to meet the increasing need for usable channel data. We continue to invest aggressively in product research and development, and are also expanding our marketing efforts so that people know who we are. It seemed the perfect time to complete the transition and adopt a name that truly describes what we do.

We didn’t have to look far. Channelinsight. We have used Channelinsight as our product name for years and now we are excited to adopt it as our company name. In doing so we continue to embrace our mission of providing unprecedented insight into the channel.

We offer the only complete channel sales management solution in the cloud, providing technology manufacturers with visibility into every partner and every end-customer in every transaction in real-time and allowing them to gain the insight necessary to drive sales and optimize inventory.

I’ll be blogging regularly on timely and important channel issues. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

As InfoNow’s business has evolved to meet changing market demand, we will now be doing business as “Channelinsight – a Business Unit of InfoNow Company.” This name more accurately reflects our evolution and mission, which is making channel sales as productive as direct sales. For marketing purposes, however, you may see us simply referred to as “Channelinsight.”

We have relaunched in May with the name “Channelinsight – a Business Unit of InfoNow”. You will be seeing advertising emphasizing our mission – “taking the guesswork out of managing your channel sales”.

We offer the only complete channel sales management solution in the cloud, providing technology manufacturers with visibility into every partner and every end-customer in every transaction in real-time and allowing them to gain the insight necessary to drive sales and optimize inventory.

This change will have no impact on the services our company provides to our clients. Our legal and billing name will remain InfoNow, and the address will remain the same. The re-branding will not impact contracts, nor do we anticipate that our clients will be required to do anything in connection with our name change. However, it will allow our clients to identify us with a name more closely aligned to the core service that we provide to them.

All office telephone and fax numbers will remain the same. Channelinsight’s corporate telephone number will remain (303) 293-0212 and our fax number will remain (303) 293-0213. Emails sent to “infonow.com” email addresses will continue to be received, however you will see your contacts from Channelinsight using the channelinsight.com address, so please update your contacts.

Current customers with InfoNow’s login (http://www.infonow.com) will continue to operate as usual under the InfoNow protocol.

Sincerely,

Mark Geene

CEO Channelinsight – a Business Unit of InfoNow

In a recent blog interview, Braham Shnider from Channel Enablers makes some good points as to why running the channel is harder than direct selling —and from my own experience I couldn’t agree more. 

I’ve personally run direct sales, channel sales, and combinations of the two. With direct sales, I controlled the resources and could hire, fire, promote and most importantly, compensate as needed.  In addition, I had real-time data on how we were performing in every region and could make timely adjustments as needed (add coverage, change resources, redeploy, etc.).  Finally, I could put significant pressure on the reps to deliver at quarter-end.  Unfortunately, the channel just didn’t share the same sense of urgency.

But running the channel doesn’t have to be more difficult. As more timely and accurate data has become available, channel managers are now finding they can address some of the same challenges faced by their direct sales peers.  

Performance-based incentive programs are one of the keys to establishing more of a “direct sales” driven approach.  Another approach is peer rankings.  Ranking partners based on their performance vs. an unnamed peer group is a powerful motivator—just as comparing a sales reps performance to their peers is critical to getting the most out of a sales team.  Timely scorecards, containing metrics such as actual performance vs. peer averages and year-over-year growth vs. peers, used as part of a periodic partner performance review can significantly influence performance—just as performance ranking does for direct sales.

 Future posts will discuss more examples of direct-selling best practices being applied to the channel.

In a recent interview, Meaghan Kelly, Vice President of Channel Strategy and SMB at HP, provided a great perspective about the sheer magnitude of the SMB marketplace and why the channel is the only way to reach it: 

“Globally 95 percent of all private companies have fewer than 500 employees. Well over half of the world’s employed individuals work in the SMB sector.  In the U.S. alone, there are 12.5 million small businesses and most of them don’t have the appropriate IT knowledge, expertise or infrastructure and are looking at trusted advisors to help manage their IT… For HP products in the U.S., SMBs represent a $57 billion opportunity.  We have 20 percent market share and want to get a big slice of the other 80 percent.”

We believe the only way to find these “trusted advisors” to small business—the VARs who truly reach the SMB market—is to understand your channel partners’ actual sales history all the way through to the end-customer.  Instead of relying on what the channel partner says they do, look at what their sales history tells you. Find the partners who have been successful reaching the other 95 percent instead of recruiting the partners who are selling to the same 5 percent that your direct sales team is selling to.  You can only do this by collecting POS data that includes the end-customer data and then processing it to identify every customer that was sold to— not just the clients that are on your strategic account list.

Channel inventory is the foundation of high tech products distribution. Having the right products in the right places at the right time and price can mean sales growth, improved margins, and satisfied customers. Conversely, a channel burdened by obsolete and excess inventory, or product that is incorrectly staged to meet sales needs and promotions, prevents vendors from effectively capitalizing on market opportunities, while driving up costs across the channel. Without real-time channel inventory visibility, companies risk gray market leakage and lost revenue.

As I talk to customers, it is clear that it’s not enough to simply manage where products are currently located. The most successful of them view channel inventory as a competitive weapon.  After all, if a customer asks for your product and it’s out of stock they don’t wait for it to be replenished, they take whatever competitor’s product that is currently available.

The rub, of course, is having real-time channel inventory visibility and the tools to understand what it means.  To solve the channel inventory shell game, you must be able to:

• Collect accurate inventory information from your partners.
• Turn collected data into insight quickly.  Hours, not days, should be your target.
• Calculate expected inventory balances for each partner location and compare to reported balances.  Variances can point to gray market activity.
• Management dashboards that alert on over and under balance conditions as compared to targets and sales trends.

Best in Class channel inventory performers have a strategy, tools and processes for each of these elements.  Do you?