These wintery weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years Eve create many diversions that put the focus on your channel’s performance on ice. Meetings and calls freeze, strategic planning slips, and the groundwork for creating a big New Year push of channel sales support ends up on the backside of decision-making mindshare – effectively putting you on a steep slope in front of the rolling snowball for the start of the year push.

To keep your channel sales support rolling during these slower times, you don’t have to think of January as your tabula rasa. Here are a couple of things you can do to melt the ice on your holiday season channel marketing push and glide toward greater ROI on your 2012 spend.

• Use your downtime to re-evaluate your incentive programs. Our recent Best Practices survey shows that 60% of respondents still rely on hands-on incentive programs. Seriously folks, there is a way to get better ROI on your programs AND real-time management of your programs to boot. Using applications like Channelinsight Incentive Manager and CRM tools such as salesforce will help you spend less time managing the programs and more time helping your sales teams close deals.
• Enhance your Channel Social Media. Engage and enable your partners through social media. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But research shows that more than 50% of channel marketers are not effectively leveraging a potent mix of traditional and social media vehicles. By the way, a recent survey by AdWeek shows that incentivized app downloads do not create customer loyalty. So can we apply this to SPIFs as well? Let me know if you think that is too giant of a leap!

By the way, check out our strategic partner CCI’s Craig DeWolf blog post, “What’s going to keep channel marketers up at night in 2012.”

I am pretty confident that here at Channelinsight we use best in class marketing efforts and engage BiC strategic partnerships to help potential customers. That’s because our tools enable channel marketers to reach your benchmarks and avoid sliding on your year-end goals. Happiest of the holiday season to you and your families.