To continue to grow and manage margin, you need leverage. High-tech manufacturers and semiconductor companies are using channel partners as a key source to find leverage in the market, helping them uncover value on every sale and contract downstream. When you think about a product that requires partners, channels, and distribution for fulfillment, accurate and timely data is necessary for everything – this includes supplier revenue recognition, crediting field compensation, and paying partner benefits. Without trusted information, more friction is inserted into the process, ultimately removing the ability to identify the impact of partner programs.
Do you have difficulty reporting ROI for channel or partner programs?
While the channel delivers immense value, it’s difficult to isolate the impact when you are part of a complex web — delivering value to the end customer. Instead, it’s wise to better understand your company’s ability to connect the dots across the ecosystem to the end customer. Piece by piece, leading high-tech companies have been assessing and filling these gaps across the channel.
Consider this playbook approach:
Review these telltale signs to identify where you may have gaps across the channel and where it’s costing you. This will ultimately help you find ways to optimize partnerships and prove ROI.
- Real-Time Data: Do you experience a lack of real-time data with 7+ day delays in receiving partner data? This delay makes it nearly impossible to accurately forecast and manage inventory, which doesn’t allow you to address issues or develop plans partner by partner.
- Scale Your Ecosystem: Does your inability to scale as your ecosystem grows occur because data collection and support costs are compounded with higher data volumes? Using various [or distributed] applications to manage commercial operations with poor data quality controls doesn’t allow you to confidently manage the relationship based on a financial or contractual basis.
- Data Validation: Does your data validation get personal because people question their ‘paycheck,’ or even your own salesforce? If yes, the time spent validating commissions and payouts can be costly. Without robust validation, you could be overpaying and creeping towards a negative margin.
Data, among other channel aspects, is an ongoing journey – it’s imperative to start this journey with the end goal in mind—to help achieve key metrics for you and your company. Ensure your team has a framework outlining the various data types attained by each partner, the type of analysis they can expect to run, and how each set of insights will define partnership success and ROI.
To help accelerate your plans heading into this next cycle, take time to:
- Reassess: Understand the reality and the challenges that take place in high-tech channels, a necessary but ongoing challenge.
- Plan: Reduce channel compliance risks and review this guide to financial compliance in the channel.
- Act: Take action and transform your channel incentive programs for today’s new business models.
For many channel leaders, finding, retaining, and building partner relationships is muscle memory, however today data is a key discipline many companies are working to improve.
You may ask yourself, “is it working”? The answer is a resounding “yes” when every step improves transparency, depth of communication, and workflows between all players in the value chain leading up to a purchase.
