(Ebook) The Definitive Guide To External Social Collaboration and Indirect Channel Marketing PDF

Collaborate beyond the enterprise
The Definitive Guide to External Social Collaboration

and Indirect Channel Marketing
eBook from Relayware

By Mike Morgan, CEO Relayware
© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 1 of 113

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Contents
Introduction 5
Why Sell Through an Indirect Channel? 6
Challenges Posed by an Indirect Channel Model 6
Knowledge is Power 7
The Pareto Principle 7
The Nature of the Relationship 9
Evolution of the Channel into a Demand-Side Ecosystem 10
Changing Behaviors 11
Chapter 1: External Social Collaboration and Communication in Business 13

Evolution in Communication 13
The Rise of Social Technologies 17
Chapter 2: Business Social Collaboration and Communication Technologies 21

The Business Issue 21
Ecosystem Social Collaboration: What is It? 22
Ecosystem Social Collaboration: The Components 24
The Benefits of Ecosystem Collaboration versus CRM and PRM 30
Consequences of Misuse of Technology 34
CRM and Ecosystem / External Collaboration System Co-existence 35
Chapter 3: Selecting Your Ecosystem 37

Go to Market Strategy 37
The Importance of Good Data 38
Chapter 4: Segmentation, Accreditation and Tiering 40

Accreditation 40
Social Segmentation 44
Chapter 5: Indirect Channel Recruitment 46

What’s in it for Me? 46
Recruitment Campaign 47
Recruitment Process 48
Mediums 49

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Targeted Campaigns 49
On-Boarding 50
Chapter 6: Enablement, Education and Development 53

Market Making 53
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Chapter 7: Indirect Channel Motivation and Incentivization 57

Being the Company of Choice 58
Show Me the Money 60
Being a Pleasure to Do Business With 62
Chapter 8: Indirect Channel Collaboration 64

Proven Methods 64
Service and Support Collaboration 64
Sales Collaboration 65
Marketing Collaboration 70
Collaboration Among the Ecosystem 72
Chapter 9: Communication 74
Communication Strategy 74
Communication Objectives 76
Selection and Segmentation of Receivers 76
Medium 77
Message 81
Response 83
Repetition and Frequency 84
Chapter 10: Service & Support 85

Channel Segmentation Versus Quality of Service 85
Delivering High Quality Yet Cost-Effective Service and Support 86
Purposeful Portals 86
Mobile Apps 93
Chapter 11: Performance Management and Optimization 96

Introduction 96
Definition 96
Setting Performance Targets 97

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Performance Measurement 98
Balanced Scorecarding 99
Balanced Scorecarding for Indirect Channels 100
Purpose of Scorecarding for Indirect Channels 100
Practical Applications of Indirect Channel Balanced Scorecarding 101
Accreditation 102
Channel Program Hierarchy 102
Automating Indirect Channel Balanced Scorecarding 103
Alternative Methods of Indirect Channel Balanced Scorecarding 104
Optimizing and Rewarding Performance 106
Developing a High Performance Channel 107
Rewarding a High Performance Channel 108
Summary 109
Selection 109
Segmentation and Accreditation 109
Recruitment and On-boarding 109
Development and Enablement 110
Motivation and Incentivization 110
Communication 111
Collaboration 111
Service and Support 111
Performance Management & Optimization 112
Additional Information 113

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Introduction
Far from heralding Indirect sales account for more than 70% of global business. It was once thought that the
internet would drive intermediaries out of business as direct distance-selling with low
the end of indirect transactional costs rendered indirect channels obsolete. For some commodity sales where the
channels as we company’s brand was strong, this did come to pass. But otherwise, the internet and
thought it might ecommerce provided a low cost route to market for the very intermediaries that we once
thought would put out of business by it. In fact, the internet is largely responsible for an
back in the dotcom
explosive growth in indirect channels created specifically as “etailers” or for conventional
era, the internet resellers; supplementing their offline business with an online channel to market of their own.
has in fact Amazon doesn’t write, produce or publish books. They’re an aggregator and an indirect
provided a global channel and have followed their success in books and physical-media music with the sale of
downloadable media and many other products. Most importantly, like many other indirect
network for indirect channels before them, they now own the customer and consequently they are far more
sales and a powerful than any one of the vendors, content creators and publishers they represent – the tail
platform for the that wags many dogs!
promotion of their Far from heralding the end of indirect channels as we thought it might back in the dotcom era,
added value. the internet has in fact provided a global network for indirect sales and a platform for the
promotion of their added value. The internet became merely a conduit for marketing and
commerce for those channels willing and able to adapt. Once again, Amazon provides us
with a prime example as it has itself become a virtual marketplace for many thousands of
other indirect channels.
More recently, the advent of Cloud services seemed once again to ring the death knell for
indirect channels in the hi-tech industry. I have spoken with countless software industry
executives in recent years who have again predicted the demise of the software channel
because they simply cannot envisage a role for intermediaries in the marketing and
support of a service that is sold, delivered, managed and maintained by the company who
also produces it. After all, products sold as a service that are simple to buy and easy to own
suit an entirely direct go to market strategy. When more complex products are sold to
large corporate accounts, again, direct makes sense, so far, so good. But complex
products, direct selling and support and SMB’s don’t mix well. In every case throughout the
history of commerce, these circumstances call for indirect channels and what companies
must do is to develop a thorough understanding of the value chain, roles and
responsibilities, rules of engagement and resolve the new challenges posed by the new
business model. Such transitions from old to new business models have always
accelerated evolution and adaptation among indirect channel ecoystems while spawning
new ones.

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Why Sell Through an Indirect Channel?

So what’s so great about indirect selling and why do companies inevitably turn to an
indirect go to market model at some point? The simple answer is that most companies
have no choice if they want to keep on growing. Marketing and selling to customers and
then supporting them directly just doesn’t scale well and costs spiral out of control. Here
are the main reasons for companies choosing an indirect model:
Extending reach
• Whether you’re looking to expand into the next town, the next country or the next
continent, indirect channels give you the most immediate and lowest cost route to
market
• They provide feet on the street that know the local market and speak the local
language
Augmenting capability
• Indirect channels may just resell your products but it’s more likely that they add
additional value
• They may market, deploy and support your products
• They may sell other complementary products and services that make your
collective value proposition stronger than yours alone
Minimizing cost
• An indirect channel gives you instant sales, marketing and other resources in your
chosen market with no incorporation fees, no start-up costs and no need for
recruiting personnel
• What’s more, they’re cheap to run and your overhead is predictable because they
entail mainly point of sale discounts and modest support costs
Challenges Posed by an Indirect Channel Model

Ubiquitous, Ubiquitous, appealing and successful as indirect selling is, it brings with it inherent
management challenges for those companies who adopt an indirect go-to-market strategy.
appealing and If you sell direct, things are relatively straightforward. You own the sales resources, and you
successful as control the message. When you introduce single or multi-tier indirect channel things start
indirect selling is, it to get complicated. Those sales and marketing resources don’t belong to you, most of the
time you don’t even know who they are. You don’t pay them and you don’t task them. And
brings with it
you neither determine nor control the messages they deliver to your customers. Nor do you
inherent directly benefit from the feedback your mutual customers provide.
management
challenges.

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Traditional Simplistic Interpretation of a Hybrid Channel Structure
Knowledge is Power
Direct selling The question of knowledge and intimacy is critical. Direct selling success is fundamentally
based upon telling people what they need to know, telling them what to do and managing
success is them doing it. But if you don’t know who is doing your selling, don’t know how to
fundamentally communicate with them and don’t know how to motivate them and influence their behavior
based upon telling even if you did, you have a big problem.
people what they Very often when we engage with a new customer, they scarcely have one named contact
need to know, per channel organization. Even fewer of these have valid contact information – email
address, social ID or telephone number appended to their contact data. If you don’t know
telling them what
who’s out there selling or how to communicate with them, you can’t talk to them and if you
to do and can’t talk to them, you can’t influence their behavior or effectively enable them to do what
managing them you want them to do. And performance management is of course out of the question.
doing it.
The Pareto Principle
This in turn generates the second problem – a cycle of increased investment (of time, effort
and resource) in and dependency upon a very small number or proportion of the indirect
channel base for the vast majority of a company’s revenue. Most companies surround
themselves with a hard-core of volume sellers – indirect channel organizations who
consistently sell the most. As the channel grows while channel management resources
continue to dwindle, channel management becomes increasingly difficult and we see the
Pareto principle taking effect:

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Another Indirect Channel Challenge – The Pareto Principle
In practice we The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and
the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects
regularly see over come from 20% of the causes.
50% of all indirect
This distribution is claimed to appear in several different aspects relevant to business
channel revenues managers. For example:
coming from 5% or
• 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers
less of the base.
• 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your customers
• 80% of your profits come from 20% of the time you spend
• 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products
• 80% of your direct sales are made by 20% of your direct sales staff
• 80% of your indirect sales are made by 20% of your indirect channels
In practice we regularly see over 50% of all indirect channel revenues coming from 5% or
less of the base. Shocked? Before you judge others, go and check your own sales data – I’ll
be equally shocked if your story is any better.
The Pareto effect typically worsens because more revenue generated by the fewest
number of accounts leads to greater consolidation in investment by the company in those
same accounts. These intermediaries typically offer limited opportunity for growth and yet
they demand the best pricing, the deepest discounts and the greatest amount of effort to

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maintain. Without the means to cost effectively develop and monetize the potential that
exists within the remaining indirect channels, our customers often reach a growth “glass
ceiling” – a revenue threshold beyond which they cannot go with their top tier of
intermediaries – a point beyond which they cannot go without investing in systems, tools,
processes and best practices to exploit the latent potential that exists.
The Nature of the Relationship

The third challenge relates to the relationship lifecycle that exists between a company and
its indirect channels. Any sales and marketing professional is familiar with the customer
lifecycle – targeting, acquisition, nurturing and repurchase or resale. But the nature of a
company’s relationship with their indirect channel is infinitely more complex and difficult to
manage. This is because the objective is not merely to generate a sale by creating a desire
to buy; it is to create a need and desire to sell, market and support on behalf of the
company in question.
The Indirect Channel Lifecycle

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If the indirect This is a process of winning hearts and minds and requires a sustained, programmatic
approach. Many of our customers mistakenly and unsuccessfully attempt to utilize social
channel model CRM systems to try to automate the management of this lifecycle but the sales and
ever looked like the marketing automation capabilities they offer are wholly inadequate for the task.
simplistic
illustration earlier
Evolution of the Channel into a Demand-Side
in this section, it
certainly does not Ecosystem
resemble this If the indirect channel model ever looked like the simplistic illustration earlier in this section,
today. it certainly does not resemble this today. Supply chains and value chains have evolved into
sophisticated ecosystems made up out of many companies and individuals each providing
products, services and knowledge to customers often acting independently but frequently
collaborating to deliver business solutions to the customer. Your product is typically only
one (small) part in such a solution. Where effective communication through the value chain
was once the primary challenge for companies and one that programs and PRM systems
solved in part, collaboration with ecosystems is now the number one challenge facing
businesses with indirect go to market strategies.
An Example of a Demand-Side Ecosystem

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Changing Behaviors
Finally and very importantly is the significant behavioral shift that has taken place within the
target audience for this lifecycle management process. The advent of social networking
and the ubiquity of the software and technologies utilized to engage in social networking
have transformed the way in which people communicate and otherwise interact. Indeed
social media has become the communication medium of choice for the generation of
individuals now entering the workplace and is rapidly displacing email for everyone else.
Some interesting statistics:
• Social media, communities and blogs are the number one generator of internet
traffic
• Instant messaging, activity streams and push updates are replacing email
• Mobile devices will outnumber desktop/laptop computing devices 5:1 by 2015
• One to one communication is giving way to one / many to many communication
• Marketing communications are giving way to collaborative conversations
• Managed relationships are giving way facilitated communities
• Individuals are more inclined to be influenced by the opinions and expressed
consensus of fellow community members than by companies
• Opt-out is giving way to opt-in (Follow, Share, Like) for communication preference
setting
The key to success These are just a few of the manifestations of this change but our customers are really
struggling to adapt. Many are only just beginning to implement first-generation Partner
is to realize that Relationship Management (PRM) technologies only to find that their limited collaboration
you are part of a and communication capabilities are unable to address the needs of their audience or to
diverse community overcome the challenges outlines above. Social CRM and PRM technology fails to address
their needs because they enable only some aspects of the sales, marketing and program
of businesses and
automation needed. Enterprise collaboration tools are great for facilitating collaboration
individuals at the but enable messaging, file and project-sharing inside a company not beyond it.
heart of which is
Let’s recap on some facts that conspire to create a pretty challenging environment:
your mutual
customer. • >96% of manufacturers sell through indirect channels to market
• They are almost entirely dependent upon loyalty and goodwill to drive indirect
revenue
• Indirect channel lifecycle is inherently complex to manage
• Communication to and throughout the indirect channel community is critical to
success
• Social paradigm and mobile technology are revolutionizing communication

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• Indirect channel needs, expectations and behaviors are changing

• Social CRM, PRM and enterprise collaboration technology all individually fail to
provide a solution
With so many challenges, it would be easy and understandable if businesses gave up

selling indirectly altogether. But they can’t and consequently won’t. Instead most tirelessly
implement the same flawed strategies they have adopted for years or decades. To do
otherwise would require a fundamental change in the way they think about indirect
channels, some effort and a little cleverly applied investment.
But for those companies willing to apply themselves, the competitive advantage alone will
make it worthwhile. This eBook is the definitive guide to making it happen!
The key to success is to realize that you are part of a diverse community of businesses
and individuals at the heart of which is your mutual customer. Stop trying to manage your
indirect channels. You cannot and will not succeed. No-one ever has. Instead collaborate
and communicate with them like you’re on the same team, treat them as individuals rather
than as an amorphous mass then sit back and watch the revenue roll in.

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Chapter 1: External Social Collaboration and

Communication in Business
As new The practice of communication by written documents carried by an intermediary from one
person or place to another almost certainly dates back nearly to the invention of writing.
technologies and However, development of formal postal systems occurred much later. The first
mediums for documented use of an organized courier service for the diffusion of written documents is in
communication Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers for the dissemination of their decrees in the territory
of the State (2400 BC).
become available,
so the access to
them and the rate Evolution in Communication
of adoption Apart from the introduction of the postage stamp and intercontinental postage services,
increases at an nothing much changed until 1837 with the invention of the telegraph allowing messages to
be conveyed long distances without the need for physical media. In 1876 the telephone
exponential rate.
was born followed by the radio in 1910. Since then, the rate of technological innovation in
communications has accelerated fuelled by the human desire to interact with each other in
ever more immediate and intimate ways.
Rate of Adoption of Communication Technology – Time to 50 Million Users

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As new technologies and mediums for communication become available, so the access to
them and the rate of adoption increases at an exponential rate. Contrast the time taken for
radio to reach its first 50 million users compared to Twitter. Of course access to high speed
internet has caused this acceleration and with the exception of cellular telephony, all
contemporary communications are dependent upon it.
Changing Demographic of Social Technology Usage as % of Total
eMail is not social If we consider the most recent additions to the range of communication mediums available
to us; Instant Messaging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, blogging, wiki’s it’s clear that
and it’s certainly they can all be described as social communication channels. They inherently facilitate
not collaborative. social or “many-to-many” communication as opposed to older forms of communication.
Regardless, we Early adoption was among the younger members of society but the demographic of social
media users has changed dramatically in the last few years.
have become
slaves to our eMail. Those of us over the age of 30 who do most of our communicating for business or during
the working day experienced our communication revolution in the 90’s and 00’s with the
advent of cell phones and email and we’ve been stubbornly hanging onto them ever since.
Look how we have engineered our cell phones to become perfect tools for sending and
receiving emails! But email is as its name suggests little more than a means of sending one-
to-one or on-to-few correspondence. It is not social and it’s certainly not collaborative.
Email has also long been hijacked by the spammers forcing us to adopt ever more creative
ways of filtering our daily communication. Regardless, we business people have become

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slaves to our email – the first application we open in the morning and the last we close at
night and the one we spend endless hours poring over all day.
This has prompted many individuals and some companies to envision a world in which
email is eradicated in favor of social communication and productivity is enhanced as a
consequence. Take a look at these great examples taken from the media:
Luis Suarez of IBM Abandons eMail

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Atos Phases Out eMail
After two decades

of inexorable
increases in global
email usage, email
is finally beginning
its unavoidable
demise.
Communications are Shifting from Email and IM to Social

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After two decades of inexorable increases in global email usage, email is finally beginning
its unavoidable demise. This decline in popularity will accelerate as a new generation
enters the workplace. And from personal experience, I can tell you that this new generation
simply don’t understand the purpose or merit of email and have no interest in using it.
The Rise of Social Technologies

After a slow start, Social technology adoption among consumers still far outpaces social technology
adoption among employees but this is because business themselves have been slower to
software adopt them. Until recently, many executives viewed social technologies with suspicion.
companies They focused on their domestic usage and feared that they would cause employees to
including Jive waste time rather than improve their productivity. But after a slow start, software companies
including Jive Software, Yammer (now owned by Microsoft) and Salesforce.com with
Software, Yammer
Chatter have made significant inroads into large enterprises since around 2009.
(now owned by
Microsoft) and
Salesforce.com
with Chatter have
made significant
inroads into large
enterprises since
around 2009.
Business Adoption of Social Technologies Lags Behind Consumer
Here are some more interesting statistics in rapid succession. The hi-tech and telecoms
industries lead the way in social technology adoption and they are showing the same
enthusiasm for social technologies as they did for resource planning and relationship
management technologies in the last decade or so. Other industries lag far behind.

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% of Companies By Sector Using Web 2.0 Social Tools
But this is understandable for a number of reasons. Firstly looking at the mix of employee
types and job roles we can see that sales and marketing, IT and R&D combined with
management, technical and frontline staff, are the biggest users.
Web 2.0 Social Tools Used by Many Job Roles and Departments

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And secondly, there is a dependency on how well networked those employees are and this
again comes down largely to the industry and the nature of the workforce.
How Well Companies Benefit from Social Technologies Depends Upon

How “Networked” They Are
McKinsey Given these statistics, it is easy to see why in a recent report, McKinsey concluded that
among commercial enterprises those engaged in software, internet and professional
concluded that services markets had both the most to gain by using social technologies and that they
among would find it extremely easy to capture the added value potential offered by them.
commercial
enterprises those
engaged in
software, internet
and professional
services markets
had the most to
gain by using
social
technologies.
Value Potential and Ease of Capture Through Social Technologies by Sector

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The largest source The largest source of value that they identified is using social technologies for interactions
within and between enterprises. McKinsey went on to estimate that social technologies,
of value that when accompanied by significant management, process and cultural transformation could
McKinsey improve the productivity of interaction workers by 20-25%. And we’re only just beginning
identified is using this journey.
social Let us consider the importance of this conclusion for the reader of this book. You are
technologies for probably reading this because you market, sell and support your products through an
ecosystem of interaction workers – people whose work requires complex interactions with
interactions within
other people, yet because they work independently from your company their work also
and between requires independent judgment. This group includes sales people, marketers, technical
enterprises. personnel managers and a range of other knowledge workers.
Imagine the impact on your enterprise of implementing social and collaborative

technologies that could complement or replace outdated communication technologies
and experiencing a 20-25% improvement in productivity.
Improved Collaboration and Communication Through Social Technology

Between Interaction Workers Could Improve Productivity by Up to 25%
Now imagine the impact of extending that productivity gain beyond the enterprise; to each
and every member of your demand-side ecosystem. And imagine the impact upon those
individuals of experiencing these productivity gains when working only with those
business partners who help facilitate this transformation; namely those employing business
social collaboration and communication technologies.

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Chapter 2: Business Social Collaboration and

Communication Technologies
The Business Issue
Business focus has It is often said that the cost of new customer acquisition is five times the cost of customer
retention. Yet many companies have yet to benefit from these economies. More significant
turned from CRM are the multiples generated by repeat purchases from retained customers and these come
to Social CRM and as a consequence of long term customer satisfaction. This in turn comes from a deeper
from “relationship understanding of each customer, their individual business challenges and proposing
solutions for those challenges rather than a "one size fits all" approach.
management” to
social These principles are as relevant for the businesses that make up a company’s demand-side
ecosystem as they are for customers. This is because the majority of businesses today are
collaboration.
more dependent upon the sales and consequently the revenues generated by such entities
as indirect sales channels than they are upon the revenues generated directly by their own
resources. The key to success then, in part at least, is the successful “management” not
only of customer relationships but also of indirect channel relationships.
In the quest for high levels of customer retention and the generation of on-going repeat
business many companies have introduced Customer Relationship Management software
systems and, often inappropriately, these have been employed to also manage
relationships with indirect channels. But unless the principles of CRM and what has come
to be known as Partner Relationship Management (PRM) were adopted enterprise-wide,
operationally, collaboratively and culturally, such software systems often achieved neither
their potential nor the company’s business goals.
Since the advent of enterprise social and collaboration strategy and associated systems at
the turn of the last decade, business focus has turned from CRM to Social CRM and from
“relationship management” to social collaboration. The principal behind this is that social
and collaborative engagement is ultimately deemed more productive than the traditional
management of transactional business relationships. Indeed in the recent McKinsey Global
Institute report “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social
Technologies”, MGI concluded that businesses could realize a 25% productivity gain
through the adoption of social and collaborative strategies and technologies.
McKinsey define social technologies as digital technologies used by people to interact

socially and together to create, enhance and exchange content Social technologies
distinguish themselves through the following three characteristics:
1. They are enabled by information technology.

2. They provide distributed rights to create, add and/or modify content and
communications.

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3. They enable distributed access to consume content and communications.
Collaborative technologies are more loosely defined but again appear to share three
common characteristics:
1. They are enabled by information technology.

2. They help facilitate action-oriented teams working together over geographic
distances by providing tools that aid communication, collaboration and the process
of problem solving and achieving a common goal.
3. They may support project management functions, such as task assignments, time-
managing deadlines, and shared calendars.
The juxtaposition of social and collaboration technology is clearly well-suited to the

application of enabling individuals separated by geographic distance to collaborate in the
shared goals of a supply- and demand-side ecosystem. The goals of the latter, which we
shall focus on in this document being namely marketing to, selling to and providing service
and support to customers.
Enable your We put forward the case then that by evolving existing Customer and Partner Relationship
Management strategies and technologies into one’s in which social collaboration is
organization to central, businesses can help to achieve long-term customer and channel partner
better leverage satisfaction, ensure repeat purchases, improve customer and partner relationships,
your ecosystem increase loyalty, decrease customer and partner turnover, decrease marketing costs
(associated with customer or partner acquisition), increase sales revenue, and thereby
through the
increase profit margins. This document sets out to define the components of such a
introduction of strategy and identify the technologies available to implement it.
reliable systems,
processes and
procedures for
Ecosystem Social Collaboration: What is It?
collaboration and Ecosystem social collaboration is a system of methodologies, strategies, software, and
collaborative web-based capabilities that help an enterprise to facilitate and engage in collaboration with
and among the ecosystem of companies and individuals that engages in both supply and
communication.
demand generation and fulfilment. It is the collection and distribution of all associated data
to all areas of your business and the socialization of data among constituents of the
ecosystem. The general purpose of such a business strategy is to enable your organization
to better leverage your ecosystem through the introduction of reliable systems, processes
and procedures for collaboration and collaborative communication.

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Social Technologies
A successful In today's competitive business environment, a successful collaboration strategy cannot

be implemented by simply installing and integrating a software package designed to
collaboration support CRM, PRM, Marketing Automation (MA), Enterprise Collaboration (EC) processes
strategy cannot be or indeed any combination of social technologies. A holistic approach to collaboration is
implemented by vital for an effective and efficient collaboration strategy. This approach includes training of
employees, a modification of business processes based on the needs of employees,
simply installing a
customers, suppliers and indirect channels to market and an adoption of relevant IT
software package. systems and/or usage of IT services that enable the organization or company to follow its
collaboration strategy.
We use the terms “collaboration” and “social collaboration” here to describe the whole
business strategy and ethos (or lack of one) oriented on ecosystem needs where the
company itself is one constituent in the ecosystem rather than as a description of a
software system although we will consider those in due course. To be effective,
collaborative engagements need to be facilitated end-to-end across the entire ecosystem.
Successful implementers of an ecosystem collaboration strategy:
• Identify and understand ecosystem success factors

• Create an ecosystem-centric culture
• Adopt ecosystem-based KPI’s
• Develop end-to-end processes to collaborate with and foster collaboration among
constituents in the ecosystem

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• Utilize integrated systems to enhance ecosystem collaboration to best suit their

needs
• Share information, tools and resources with ecosystem members
• Engage in and facilitate social and collaborative discussions with and among your
ecosystem
• Monitor and analyze all aspects of ecosystem collaboration
Ecosystem collaboration attempts to integrate and automate the various demand-side
processes within a company and expose them to the external ecosystem to facilitate
collaboration and communication with those processes and the individuals responsible for
them.
Ecosystem Social Collaboration: The Components

There are five components of a strategy:
1. Operational Collaboration - automation of collaborative marketing, sales and service

business processes and engagements
2. Community Collaboration – facilitation of peer to peer and workgroup collaboration
3. Multi-Channel Communication – facilitating collaborative discussions with and
throughout the ecosystem
4. Analytical Collaboration - support to analyze ecosystem behavior, implementing
business intelligence-like technology
5. Cultural Collaboration – transformation your company culture into a collaborative
culture
1. Operational Collaboration
Operational Operational Collaboration is the transformation of so-called "front office" business
processes, which include all aspects of ecosystem contact (sales, marketing, learning and
Collaboration is service) into collaborative engagements. This involves a shift from linear “cascaded”
the transformation business processes “downstream” to the facilitation of team working between two or
of so-called "front more companies or individuals and the collaboration on shared tasks.
office" business Operational collaboration provides the following benefits:

processes, which
• Facilitates personalized, efficient and collegiate engagement
include all aspects
• Enables a 360-degree view of members of your ecosystem and the focus of
of ecosystem into collaboration (e.g. customer, project, support ticket) while you are collaborating
collaborative with them
engagements. • Allows members of the ecosystem to interact and collaborate autonomously

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• Everyone in your organization from sales people to service personnel can access
complete history of all ecosystem interaction regardless of the touch point
The operational part of ecosystem collaboration typically involves four general areas of
business:
Sales Collaboration
Sales collaboration should encompass the most critical sales and sales force
management functions carried out by your direct sales force (and automated by CRM)
but in this case now extended to address these for your entire ecosystem. These functions
include account management, contact management, quote management, lead
management, pipeline management, forecasting, sales administration, keeping track of
customer preferences, buying habits, and demographics, as well as performance. Just as
Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools are designed to improve field sales productivity,
ecosystem sales collaboration tools are designed to improve ecosystem sales
productivity. Key components of sales collaboration are the ability to facilitate joint
management of sales processes with ecosystem members using web, social and mobile
tools and tight integration with CRM, product catalogues and pricing.
Marketing Collaboration
Marketing collaboration enables the sharing of information about the business
environment, including competitors, industry trends, and macro-environmental
variables. It is the execution side of joint-campaign management, demand generation
and lead management. The intent of marketing collaboration applications is to improve
marketing campaign efficiencies and effectiveness across the ecosystem. Conventional
Marketing Automation (MA) applications on the other hand are solely focused on
managing these for the company alone.

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Collaborative and Cooperative Learning
The operational Learning collaboration and cooperation enables the transfer of knowledge between the
source and individuals within the ecosystem that is specific to the role the individual
part of ecosystem performs on behalf of the company or their employer. A transfer of knowledge among
collaboration ecosystem members may also be facilitated. The underlying premise of collaborative
typically involves learning is based upon consensus building through cooperation among the participants.
Cooperative learning is defined by a set of processes which help people interact together
sales and
in order to accomplish a specific goal or develop an end product which is usually content
marketing specific. It is more directive than a collaborative approach and is best suited to guided
collaboration, learning.
collaborative and The knowledge transfer or training may take various forms ranging from sales or
co-operative technical skills to product, market or customer-specific information. It may be ad-hoc or
structured in personal “certification” schemes or accretive organization-level
learning and
“accreditation” programs for which tests must be taken and compliance assured. The
service and intent of learning collaboration applications is to improve personal and organizational
support knowledge, skills and expertise and so increase effectiveness of resources across the
collaboration. ecosystem. Conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS) on the other hand are
solely focused on managing these for the company’s internal resources alone.
Service and Support Collaboration

Conventional Customer Service and Support (CSS) applications automate service
requests, complaints, product returns, and information requests leveraging shared
customer information. The assumption here is that customer support interactions are
owned by the company. In practice, most service interactions are handled by external
members of the ecosystem and the company typically becomes involved with
escalations. Service and support collaboration encompasses the shared responsibility
for providing customer service and support and provides the means for joint
management of service and support processes with ecosystem members using web,
social and mobile tools and tight integration with CSS systems.
Widely available CRM and PRM software systems are often known as "front office
solutions." This is because they deal directly with the customer or sales “partner”. Their
purpose is to automate operational tasks and processes and their functions can be
broken down in a similar way as we have done here. But they cannot be considered
“collaborative” solutions for the following reasons:
• CRM systems encompass SFA and to some extent MA but they are strictly focused
on processes associated with the customer which are typically transactional and
involve little or no interaction.
• PRM systems primarily address marketing program automation e.g. opportunity

management, incentives, rebate programs etc. and while some degree of web-
based interaction takes place through “partner portals” but do so while utilizing

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conventional linear, downstream communication between no more than two

parties. Few if any processes can be deemed truly collaborative.
2. Community Collaboration
Community While operational collaboration largely deals with processes and program collaboration,
community collaboration requires the company to facilitate collaborative dialogue and
collaboration engagements between it and the ecosystem and among the members of the ecosystem.
requires the This is achieved through the provision of online community and group networking and
company to discussion tools through which individuals who share common roles, experience, skills
and interests can interact, share knowledge, information, files and documents and
facilitate
engage in collaborative conversations.
collaborative
Through the integration of portals, social networks, instant messaging and mobile apps,
dialogue and community collaboration tools ecosystem collaboration allows members to interact and
engagements communicate using the widest variety of mediums.
between it and the
ecosystem and 3. Multi-Channel Collaborative Communication
among the
Ecosystem collaboration facilitates interactions through all channels (personal, letter,
members of the phone, web, e-mail, social and mobile) and through these mediums supports co-
ecosystem. ordination of employee teams and ecosystem members. It is a solution that brings
people, processes and data together so companies can work together to better serve
and retain their customers. The data/activities can be structured, unstructured, person-
to-person, group-to-group, community-to-community, conversational, and/or
transactional in nature but always interactive and collaborative.
Collaborative communication provides the following benefits:
• Enables efficient productive interactions across all communication channels to,

through and within the ecosystem
• Enables autonomous, online collaboration to reduce customer service costs

• Integrates offline communication channels enabling broadest possible monitored,
tracked and recorded interaction
• Enables 24x7 collaboration regardless of location

• Ensures that communication and collaboration takes place through a medium of
the participant’s choice
• Dramatically improves success rates

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4. Analytical Collaboration
In analytical collaboration, data gathered within operational collaboration and/or other
sources are analyzed to segment ecosystem communities according to profile or
behavior or to identify potential to enhance peer-to-peer, workgroup or community
collaboration. Ecosystem analysis typically can lead to more effective interaction and
more targeted campaigns to increase skills, shared knowledge and mindshare.
Examples of campaigns directed towards ecosystem members are:
• Selection and segmentation – profiling and separating the ecosystem into multiple
overlapping groups with common attributes or behaviors
• Recruitment and onboarding – acquiring new companies or individuals for the

ecosystem and nurturing them so that they are productive
• Training and enablement – developing skills and instilling knowledge within

ecosystem members to enable them to be more effective
• Motivation and incentivization – providing tactical and accretive inducements to

improve performance
• Performance management – setting and measuring attainment against joint targets

Analysis typically covers but is not limited to:
• Decision support through dashboards, reporting, metrics, performance etc.

• Predictive modeling of ecosystem attributes
• Strategy and research
• Analysis of data may relate to one or more of the following analyses:
• Campaign management and analysis
• Communication channel optimization
• Contact optimization
• Recruitment / reactivation / retention
• Segmentation
• Satisfaction and success measurement / increase
• Sales coverage optimization
• Marketing coverage optimization
• Financial forecasting
• Pricing optimization
• Product development
• Program evaluation / optimization
• Business process optimization
• Risk assessment and management

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5. Cultural Collaboration
Cultural Cultural collaboration aligns the culture of the company with the aim of achieving holistic
collaboration internally and externally with the ecosystem. Cultural collaboration can be
collaboration attained by:
aligns the culture
• Identifying and understanding ecosystem success factors
of the company
with the aim of • Creating an ecosystem-centric culture
achieving holistic • Adopting ecosystem-based KPI’s
collaboration • Developing end-to-end processes to collaborate with and foster collaboration
internally and among constituents in the ecosystem
externally with the • Utilizing integrated systems to enhance ecosystem collaboration to best suit their
ecosystem. needs
• Sharing information, tools and resources with ecosystem members

• Engaging in and facilitating social and collaborative discussions with and among
your ecosystem
• Monitoring and analyzing all aspects of ecosystem collaboration

Few software systems deliver to their full potential. This is partly because most fail to offer
a complete end to end solution, addressing the needs of the users. But failure can also be
attributed to a lack of cultural transformation in line with basic principles. CRM and PRM
are prime examples and when they fail, they often do so because company executives
have failed to make the cultural changes necessary to ensure success.
Enterprise collaboration is the subject of much attention (as well as investment) from
company executives right now not least because it is highly acclaimed for its impact on
productivity and efficiency. As company cultures evolve and collaboration gains its
rightful place in corporate “DNA”, so the criticality of expanding the reach of
collaboration beyond the enterprise will grow.

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The Benefits of Ecosystem Collaboration versus CRM

and PRM
Enterprise Ecosystem collaboration, in its broadest sense, means facilitating collaboration with and
between members of a business ecosystem. A good collaboration strategy will allow a
collaboration is the business to target, recruit, onboard, train and develop, motivate and drive improved
subject of much performance with every constituent within the ecosystem while enabling multi-channel
attention and communication to and through every device and medium available.
investment Specific benefits at every stage of the relationship lifecycle include:

because it is
acclaimed for its Selection and Segmentation
impact on
It is crucial to build an ecosystem that addresses the needs of your customers. One must
productivity and
therefore define the nature of the ecosystem by aligning it with your go to market strategy:
efficiency.
• Geography – what regions, countries, states, cities etc. does your ecosystem need
to cover and what degree of coverage is required in terms of capabilities to service
the markets there?
• Horizontal Markets – what type and size of organization, knowledge and skills are
required to address the large, medium and small business customers or consumers
you wish to reach?
• Vertical Markets – what vertical market expertise will you need to service the
customers therein?
• Products – what product knowledge, sales, marketing and technical skills will you
need relating to your own products and complementary products from other
suppliers?
• Value Proposition – what will your joint value proposition be to the customer?
Data can be sourced from a wide variety of sources to load into your system before
profiling and segmenting your base, building coverage maps and identifying gaps in your
existing ecosystem.
CRM and PRM systems can store the data and provide reporting capabilities but few will
afford the richness of capabilities for balanced score-carding and detailed profile-matching
necessary.
Ensuring that your ecosystem is selected according to the needs of your go to market
strategy and your customer needs results in optimized market coverage and customer
satisfaction.

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Recruitment and On-boarding

Ensuring that your When engaging in targeted recruitment to your selected and segmented lists, data is of
paramount importance. This includes acquired knowledge about the individuals as well as
ecosystem is the companies that make up your ecosystem. When it comes to the act of recruitment, any
selected according CRM or PRM system can manage a simple outbound recruitment campaign if it has contact
to the needs of names and a medium for delivery. But simple as it is to do; running an email campaign
alone will severely limit your chances of success. Firstly, any outbound campaign must
your go to market
feature multi-channel and multi-media delivery. It must include direct contact by telephone,
strategy and your social networking, instant messaging and it must reach the recipients on and through any
customer needs medium or device they choose to use.
results in optimized There must be a conscious act that the recipient must undertake to establish the
market coverage relationship. This act may range from merely “Following” your communications through to
and customer downloading your mobile app and signing in or formally registering to join your community
program and possibly even signing up to your commercial terms. All of these things require
satisfaction. a web, social and / or mobile presence and some require an automated registration
process hosted on a secure portal or mobile app feeding into an approval process and the
automated distribution of security credentials. Here we have already gone far beyond the
scope of CRM or PRM but it is in the next crucial stage of the process that a truly
collaborative methodology and engagement is essential. The act of registration is merely
the first step. What must follow is an extended on-boarding campaign (similar to a lead
nurturing campaigns as supported by MA systems) in order to set the partner on the path
to development. This campaign requires the production and delivery of time or event-
triggered on-boarding communications. Once again, these must take many forms and
utilize multiple communication channels and they must be personalized and profile-
sensitive. Their purpose is to improve engagement and minimize early churn of new
recruits.
Recruitment can also be aided and your campaign’s reach extended through viral
communications, social re-communication, community interaction and simple mobile and
web tools like invite-a-friend drawing on personal contact data on the device.
Ensuring that your ecosystem is recruited effectively in accordance with your go to market
strategy and then nurtured through the formative stages of the relationship ensures higher
levels of retention and far higher levels of engagement in later phases of the lifecycle.
Training and Enablement

No company would deploy a new member of staff into a sales, marketing or support role
without providing proper structured and role-specific training, yet most companies expect
their ecosystems to perform complex tasks with little or no formal education. Indeed after
recruiting a new member, there usually follows an awkward silence while both parties wait
for the other to deliver. Providing adequate knowledge and tools for their ecosystem is

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every company’s responsibility and when doing so is facilitated through simple email
messages it is well within the capabilities of a CRM or PRM system. However when it comes
to delivering training curriculum management, content creation, delivery, testing and
certification, most organizations will look to a commercially available learning management
system (LMS). However, these applications are typically geared to employee training and,
on the whole, perform poorly when managing the complex processes associated with an
ecosystem learning program. With the right technology, interactive training can be
delivered online or via a mobile device to ecosystem members at the appropriate time to
suit the stage in the development of the relationship and their personal profile and at a
convenient time to suit their needs. This incorporates everything from simple time or event-
triggered and context-sensitive multi-media updates or refreshers through to sophisticated
multi-tier, curriculum-based certification programs. In the case of the latter, results can be
automatically collated to determine organization-level accreditation which in turn will lead
to further structured learning for the individual.
A well trained ecosystem is inherently more effective and delivers significantly higher levels
of customer satisfaction.
Motivation and Incentivization

A well trained Many companies outsource loyalty or incentive program management simply because
they are too complex to manage and too time consuming to administer. Most are based on
ecosystem is the simple premise that sales are rewarded with points, prizes or money. Most are
inherently more unsuccessful because they usually only target those individuals who are in a sales role and
effective and who are already actively engaged in selling on behalf of the company or else they reward
the company for hitting targets that were often predetermined to be easily achieved. As a
delivers
consequence, they often simply reward people and companies for sales that would have
significantly higher been won regardless.
levels of customer
Collaborative motivation and incentivization is focused on rewarding individuals for
satisfaction. performing tasks, achieving objectives or otherwise making a contribution to overall
ecosystem effectiveness and its goals cannot be achieved through the use of CRM or PRM
systems. The practice monitors, recognizes and records all interactions with the members
and represents a form of gameification. Just a few examples of activities that should and
could qualify for rewards are:
• Registration
• Profile enhancement
• Downloading an using a mobile app
• Portal visits and social tagging of pages
• Social interaction; Likes, Follows, Shares, Comments
• Subscription to authors and communication topics

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• Reading emails
• Interaction with and contribution to community and group discussions
• Training participation and certification achievement
• Watching videos
• Downloading documents
• Submitting joint business plans
• Lead acceptance, updates and closure
• Deal registration, updates and closure
• Launching joint marketing campaigns
• Achieving ROI targets for marketing activities
• Compliance
• Completing service calls and installations
• Meeting first-time fix rates
Of course making sales is still important but collaborative ecosystem motivation is focused
on rewarding everyone for making a contribution no matter how small to collective
success. Rewards themselves need not be prizes or money. The application of basic
gameification principles can ensure that the reward of merely monitoring your
achievements and being able to share them with others can be enough to motivate
otherwise cynical individuals to participate.
Well-motivated and incentivized people perform better. And a more highly performing
ecosystem delivers improved results and heightened levels of customer satisfaction.

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Sales, Marketing, Service and Support Collaboration

Operational Just as companies need to monitor their performance and the performance of their staff
against defined KPI’s, it is essential for them to pay close attention to the performance of
ecosystem individuals within their external ecosystem and of the ecosystem as a whole. While sales
collaboration analysis and reporting is a common feature of any CRM and PRM system, there any many
displaces PRM other metrics used to measure ecosystem performance beyond merely revenue delivered
including ecosystem engagement (examples of which are detailed in an earlier section of
and channel
this document). While a CRM or PRM system requires integration with various external
programs and systems to import critical data for a balanced assessment of performance, an ecosystem
takes both the collaboration solution captures not only all of the data associated with the constituents
depth and breadth within your ecosystem but it also captures information about each and every interaction
with and between them and with your mutual customers as well because all of the
and interaction to associated apps and communications channels reside on or interact with the same
an entirely new platform.
level improving Ecosystem performance cannot be effectively measured merely through tracking sales
efficiency and performance. Instead companies have to establish a broad set of performance KPI’s linked
operational to every activity and every interaction they have with their ecosystem and that takes place
within it. By doing this they can take a holistic and objective approach to performance
effectiveness for all
management.
members of the
ecosystem.
Consequences of Misuse of Technology
Companies who use CRM and MA systems to engage in ecosystem collaboration have an
extremely poor record of success. These are customer-centric sales and marketing tools
and wholly unsuited to the task. A good compromise can be achieved by deploying a PRM
system but this technology has failed to keep up with the times and the changes to
collaboration and communication that the last decade has brought.
Currently, only a small portion of companies have adopted a PRM strategy or employed a
software system to execute it. Indeed most are still driving their business as they always
have done by using spreadsheets and manpower. Minorities have chosen to use an
incumbent CRM system to support basic contact, lead and opportunity management, but
that is as far as it goes. Hence, the results are almost always disappointing and the
business doesn’t reap the benefits from the tools.
Ecosystem collaboration solutions effectively replace PRM systems as they offer all of their
functionality but additionally they fulfill contemporary needs for peer-to-peer and
community collaboration and multi-channel communication incorporating social,
messaging and mobile thereby rendering PRM obsolete.

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CRM and Ecosystem / External Collaboration System

Co-existence
Integrating CRM Any company that has made an investment in a CRM system is unlikely to want to discard it
and the investment it represents in order to deploy a system specifically designed for
and external facilitating collaboration beyond the enterprise. So the question “can we link our CRM
collaboration system with a complementary system?” is often asked and the answer is “yes!” Integrating
systems allows CRM and external collaboration systems allows organizations to bring together all parties
in the ecosystem including the customer into one virtual database while preserves the
organizations to
integrity and uniqueness of customer and non-customer systems and tools. Several of our
bring together all customers use a CRM system as: a sales automation system for direct sales teams, an MA
parties in the tool for business environment analysis and the execution tool for campaign and lead
ecosystem. management.
Relayware Ecosystem Collaboration Solution
Meanwhile, Relayware manages all demand-side ecosystem interaction including sales

and marketing collaboration, service and support and learning. Relayware also provides

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valuable channel reporting, analysis and decision-making support; it is therefore widely

used by a broad range of internal functions as an invaluable business tool and data source.
With its broad range of communications channels, including web, email, social networking,
messaging and mobile, Relayware also ensures that companies can get their messages to
the right people at the right time no matter where they are or through which device they
choose to communicate.
PRM is obsolete but (Social) CRM is here to stay. However, since CRM lacks the capability
to facilitate collaboration, integration between CRM and ecosystem / external collaboration
and social communication solutions will become commonplace and, will be in our view
both an optimal solution to significant business challenges and a means of capitalizing on
many significant business opportunities.
The rest of this book examines the relationship lifecycle between companies like yours and
their demand-side ecosystems and establishes best practice in using external or
ecosystem collaboration and social communication technologies to substantially improve
productivity, outmanoeuvre your competition, drive increased revenues and improve your
return on investment in sales, marketing and support activities associated with your
indirect channels.

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Chapter 3: Selecting Your Ecosystem

The first step in Earlier, I described the indirect channel relationship lifecycle which by its very nature is a
continuum. But we have to start the process somewhere and it seems logical to begin
developing your where all channel engagement strategies should, but often don’t begin – selecting the type
indirect channel of organizations needed to achieve your business objectives. I also drew the analogy
strategy is to between your relationship with your indirect channels and your relationship with
employees. Logically before recruiting, on-boarding, training, motivating and managing
ensure that you
new sales or marketing personnel, you would start by writing a job description defining the
have a clear location, role, responsibilities, required skills and competencies associated with the job.
understanding of Incredibly many companies embarking on an indirect channel strategy for the first time
your existing go- ignore this step and companies with mature strategies rarely if ever review their channel
selection. The former often examine the channel landscape and try to reverse-match what
to-market strategy. they see with their needs. The CEO of a Silicon Valley cloud security software start-up
typified this behavior recently when he told me ”we went after the VAR channel that sell
Symantec and McAfee but we’ve found it very tough to get traction.” Of course they have.
Symantec VAR’s have no motivation to sell a start-up’s cloud service when they already sell
the market-leader’s conventional licensed software!
The latter stubbornly stick to an established channel even though over time, they’re target
markets and / or products may change significantly.
Go to Market Strategy
The first step in developing your indirect channel strategy is to ensure that you have a clear
understanding of your existing go-to-market strategy. This seems obvious. But ask
yourself:
• What are our target markets - geographic, product, horizontal and vertical?
• Who are our target customers - who benefits from our products and services, what
size and type are they?
• What kind of indirect channel addresses these customers offering the kind of
product and services they want to buy?
• What products and services do we have that will address the needs of the
customers and which will appeal to the channels that service them?
• What are our value propositions to both customer and channel indirect channels?
Answering these simple questions will lead you to the right indirect channel channels and
help define your indirect channel selection and recruitment strategy by establishing
selection criteria.

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The Importance of Good Data

To get a complete All too often, companies choose their indirect channels based upon small amounts of data
that can be easily accessed, or make attempts to gather more detailed information with a
picture of your manual approach.
potential indirect
The result is that important clues about why certain companies are unlikely to make good
channel indirect channels are missed and more importantly, companies fail to discover the
landscape, you companies that could become some of their most successful indirect channels. Remember
must consider the words of the cloud services executive from earlier in this chapter?
detailed research, Many companies mistakenly assume they know who the ideal indirect channels are based
data pooling and if upon local knowledge and ‘gut feel’. Whilst this approach may work on a local scale it
necessary data cannot succeed as a basis for a regional or global strategy. To get a complete picture of
your potential indirect channel landscape, you must consider detailed research, data
acquisition. pooling and if necessary data acquisition. Before you start, decide what kind of information
you will need to know about each indirect channel in order to:
• Assess their suitability for partnership (your selection criteria)

• Benchmark them against their competition
• Communicate with them when the time is right
Pull together as much data as possible from internal sources on as many existing and
potential indirect channels as possible. Leave no stone unturned. Draw from your
marketing databases, contact lists, ERP, SCM, LMS, MA and CRM systems and create a
single central repository in which to store your indirect channel data.
When you have exhausted all existing internal sources, consider utilizing low-cost
resources to conduct web-based desk research, find out who is selling for your direct
competitors, contact your distributors for sell-through and contact data or as a last resort,
approach a data specialist with a very tight brief. Ask the provider to map the data you
already have against the total data they have available ensuring that you are supplementing
your existing data rather than replacing it with exactly the same companies - at your own
expense. Most importantly, ensure that you acquire current contact information on key
personnel - understand who you can’t sell to, market to or recruit through, choosing only
the contacts right for you.
Don’t be surprised if the indirect channels you subsequently select are very different from
those you expected or the channels you have now. Most companies outgrow their indirect
channel network as their go-to-market strategy evolves but as I highlighted earlier,
surprisingly few take proactive steps to do anything about this. Remember, indirect
channels don’t always evolve at the same pace or in the same direction as the companies
whose products they sell.

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Few companies have the patience or nerve to invest in indirect channel development or
reselection. History offers many examples of companies who have found a very real and
urgent need to find alternative channels to market. Note that when Apple launched the
iPod, the company’s global franchise network of Apple Center’s had little to offer the
company in taking it to market. And cannily, Apple chose to complement established
retailers with its own chain of retail outlets.
Common Data / System Complexity with CRM as the Hub
Think about what Above all, start with defining what you need to know to achieve your goal of indirect
channel selection, create a single data repository with a consistent data structure that
you intend to do meets your current and your future needs. The resultant indirect channel database should
with the database be accessible as a business tool by all those in your company who will need to interact with
once you have your indirect channel network. It is important also that you develop a strategy and a
methodology for maintaining the data’s currency such that it continues to be fit for purpose.
built it and then
As we shall see later, CRM systems seem like the obvious choice but beware! Think about
decide whether a what you intend to do with the database once you have built it and then decide whether a
CRM system will be CRM system will be flexible enough to support the complexity of an indirect route to market
flexible enough to while enabling self-profiling and the range of programs you will no doubt wish to automate.
Sales automation alone addresses few if any of the key lifecycle components alone.
support the
complexity of an
indirect route to
market while
enabling self-
profiling and the
range of programs
you will no doubt
wish to automate.
Common Data / System Simplicity with CRM as the Hub and Relayware
as Channel-Centric System

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Chapter 4: Segmentation, Accreditation and

Tiering
Using an Once you have decided which indirect channels you need in order to implement your go to
market strategy, it’s time to establish a framework for your ecosystem. Engaging with your
accreditation channel as an amorphous mass is as unthinkable as engaging with your customers in the
scheme to same way so you need to create communities of entities that share common attributes so
segment an that you can communicate and ultimately collaborate and facilitate collaboration in the
most effective and productive way.
indirect channel is
not the right Once again, data is critical here. Just as with selection, you need to decide which attributes
are important to you and how you will use them to segment your channel.
approach for every
company.
Accreditation
I will illustrate segmentation methodology by using channel accreditation as an example.
This is because if it is done properly and utilizes balanced scorecarding, it can be very
effective.
First a word of caution! Using an accreditation or certification scheme to segment an

indirect channel has been the norm in several industries for decades but just because
accreditation is the accepted approach does not mean that it is right for every company.
Before you consider it, ask yourself a few questions to assess your true objective:
• Do I want to maximize the number of indirect channels I recruit?

• Conversely, do I want to recruit and retain only those indirect channels who meet
stringent criteria?
• At what stage in the technology lifecycle is my product?

• What do I want to measure and can I measure it?
• Can I monitor and manage an accreditation program?
• In who’s best interest is an accreditation program - ours, the customer’s or the
indirect channel’s?
• What would compel indirect channels to join a program?

• What commitments will I require in return?
Accreditation programs are typically unappealing to mainstream channels because they
require investment to participate and generally deliver limited rewards. By contrast, value
added channels (Value Added Resellers and Distributors – VAR’s and VAD’s) keenly

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embrace them because they provide a means of specialization and differentiation.

Specialization is the key. VAR / VAD channels don’t want to maintain multiple
accreditations unless they are complementary. It is therefore important to understand your
objectives in developing and implementing such a program.
As the market’s Any product’s adoption lifecycle can be visualized using a bell curve as shown below:
familiarity with the

underlying
technology grows
and the product or
underlying
technology begins
to enter the
mainstream, a
more ‘inclusive’
indirect channel
strategy is needed
to drive
widespread Aligning Indirect Channels with a Product’s Lifecycle
adoption and If accreditation seems like the right approach, take a pragmatic approach to defining the
higher sales criteria:
volumes. • What knowledge, skills, facilities are actually required?
• Will accreditation be awarded based upon quantitative or qualitative criteria or
both?
• What exactly will I measure?
• Do I have the necessary information and if so, how will I analyze it?
• How will I administer and manage the program?
• How will we play our part in supporting the channel to maintain their accreditation?
• What will happen to defaulters?
• What are the rewards for retention?
• Do I have the systems, processes and resources to manage the program?
The first rule is ‘don’t set criteria that are not absolutely necessary’. If your channel can see
no point in your criteria and they have no knock-on benefits to the customer, then your
channel will be less inclined to try to achieve them. The next point is very subjective but our
view is that revenue, volume and unit sales targets sit rather uncomfortably alongside
value-based accreditation criteria. Accreditation schemes that start out with conflicts of

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interest rarely succeed and in our experience, the need to achieve quarterly revenue
targets often outweighs the need to maintain the credibility and respectability of an
accreditation program.
It is important to ensure that criteria can be accurately and consistently measured and
properly audited. You must be in possession of all of the data required to award an
accreditation. As a general rule, data that can be sourced from and verified upon internal
systems and data sources is more reliable than data that is sourced from third party
sources, especially the indirect channels themselves.
By now, many companies will be thinking ‘the only irrefutable data I have relates to sales
results and numbers of trained personnel’ and it is for this reason that most companies
often distil their accreditation scheme criteria down to these two factors. Beware! If an
accreditation scheme is to be truly valued by indirect channels and customers alike and if it
is to deliver results, you must be much more thorough.
Value Based Segmentation

A tried-and-tested approach for value-based indirect channel segmentation is based upon
the balanced scorecard method. Using this approach, you can identify all of the criteria
both quantitative and qualitative and assign those scores and weightings that reflect their
importance, scoring each indirect channel or potential indirect channel accordingly.
The balanced scorecard approach works well in two different scenarios:
1. When relatively small numbers of indirect channels are involved and hence the
process can be managed adequately using manual methods
2. When larger numbers of indirect channels are involved and a suitable technology
solution is deployed to conduct automated analysis
Both scenarios require good data sourced from a variety of places:
• Your transactional or ERP systems
• Contact databases used by marketing staff to distribute channel marketing

communications
• Contact management systems used by channel account managers
• Training or learning management systems
• Technical support systems
• External sources such as data companies, industry directories and trade show
catalogues

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Input from these various sources needs to be brought together into a single repository and
one must ensure that it is accurate, consistent and uniform. When these conditions are met,
you can scorecard your indirect channels.
Multiple Measurement Criteria
Your accreditation Establishing multiple measurement criteria creates a need for repetition and continual
validation. This is complex to manage and nowhere will this complexity be felt more than in
scheme must be the areas of fulfilment and administration. Before embarking on this route, ask yourself:
sufficiently robust
• Who will transfer the knowledge to your indirect channels to the level you require?
and flexible to
• Who will monitor and manage accreditation criteria attainment across your
cater for such channel?
indirect channels • What systems processes and supporting resources will be made available to them
for which revenue to do it?
criteria and • How will you manage education, examination and certification?
product margin will • How will you manage certification expiry? How will you punish defaulters?
be completely
And what of those indirect channels who do maintain their accreditation? Those who do
irrelevant and everything that is asked of them? How will you reward them? How will you protect their
counter- investment? How will you support them to maintain their accreditation? And how will you
productive. manage those who create demand for you without actually fulfilling it? After all, many
companies have the expertise and customer relationships to influence buying decisions
and yet they have no interest in actually supplying the customer with the solution.
Your accreditation scheme must be sufficiently robust and flexible to cater for such indirect
channels for which revenue criteria and product margin will be completely irrelevant and
counter-productive.
Indirect channel segmentation through accreditation is a proven and successful method of

targeting a suitably qualified indirect channel network or channel but only if your product is
in the right phase of its lifecycle. Exclusive models such as this will deter volume channels
from selling mainstream products if alternatives exist in the market. For value added
channels selling early-life, specialist or low volume/high value products, accreditation can
work well depending on the approach to effective administration and management of data,
systems, processes and resources that exist to implement such a program.

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Social Segmentation
Companies will Segmenting your indirect channel based upon compliance with a predefined set of criteria
that is unique to your company, product, market or customers and according to company
have to profile is for many companies the end of the line. It should be the beginning because so far
acknowledge that you have only satisfied your own needs.
they are nothing As I intimated earlier, in the past, vendors saw themselves at the top of the food chain with a
more or less than succession of indirect channel tiers between them and the customer. They pushed
members of these programs and information downstream and attempted to “manage” their indirect channel. It
just doesn’t work that way today. I’m not really sure it ever did.
communities and
that they must play Your indirect channel represents a rich and diverse ecosystem of companies and
an active role in individuals. This ecosystem is a community that is comprised of many smaller communities
of businesses and people each with shared attributes and each sub-community is
collaborating with comprised of still smaller groups with shared interests. Companies wanting to be
and facilitating successful in harnessing the potential of their indirect channel ecosystems in the future will
collaboration have to acknowledge that they are nothing more or less than members of these
communities and that they must play an active role in collaborating with and facilitating
among them.
collaboration among them. There is no food chain in contemporary business ecosystems.
At a very high level, you know that the constituents in your ecosystem have some things in
common:
• They market, sell, support or recommend products or services like yours

• They market to, sell to, service or support the customers that you want to reach
• They are active where you are or want to be active
• They want to make money
Your task in segmenting this ecosystem is in facilitating collaborative conversations among

companies and people who share common interests and then listening to and engaging in
the dialogue. Do this and the ecosystem will form itself into multiple overlapping
communities all by itself and if you possess the technology to make it happen and to
monitor and track the interactions you will be able to learn more about those communities
and have more effect on their behavior than you could ever imagine possible.

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Facilitate I will address this topic in more detail later in the chapter that deals with collaboration as we
explore how to do it. But here I simply want to tackle the question of why you should. Earlier
collaborative I talked about behavioral change in the context of communication methods and
conversations preference. I also referenced a shift in the way individuals are influenced - by the opinions
among companies and expressed consensus of fellow community members than by companies. Logically
then it follows that building communities, facilitating collaborative conversations, and
and people who
through them encouraging members to endorse your company, your products and your
share common strategies will play a big part in generating positive feelings about you and influencing
interests. positive behavior. What is more, eventually the community will become self-sustaining and
a font of knowledge for all of its members. In time reducing the need for you to fuel
conversations and provide answers and support.
Since you facilitate these conversations, they take place on your systems and the output
can be recorded and analyzed you can now use this data to create usable segmentations of
your communities based upon the groups and discussion topics to which they subscribe,
their shares, likes and comments. This in turn enables you to engage in much more
effective targeting of conventional communications. Better targeting and topic relevance
improves response rates and outcomes. We will address much more of this later.

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Chapter 5: Indirect Channel Recruitment

Today, indirect In the previous chapters, we examined methodologies for identifying the attributes of
suitable indirect channels and for segmenting those indirect channels into the most
channel programs appropriate groups. Now it is time to get those indirect channels on board.
themselves have
to be the
differentiator and What’s in it for Me?
through them, a Many companies now throw together a few deliverables that are cheap and easy to deliver
company needs to and dress them with a logo and a brand name. This was fine in the days when the market
convey actions as was less crowded, less competitive and when companies could differentiate themselves
through their unique technology. But in the age of technology commoditization and
well as words that convergence, most lack the means to compel their indirect channels to work with them
motivate indirect simply because their product was the best or the only available.
channels to work Today, indirect channel programs themselves have to be the differentiator and through
with them rather them, a company needs to convey actions as well as words that motivate indirect channels
than their to work with them rather than their competitors. But what do indirect channels want to
hear? In essence:
competitors.
• You will develop products or services that are superior to your competitors
• You will create a desire within your mutual customers to buy new products /
services or upgrade from existing ones
• You will invest in demand generation
• You will make customers receptive to buying your products and your brand
• You will direct customers to your indirect channels
• You will direct your indirect channels to potential customers
• You will minimize channel conflict
• You will provide the necessary information, education, tools and resources to
assist your indirect channels in marketing, selling and if necessary supporting your
products
• You will ensure that the sale of your products / services will prove to a be a
profitable enterprise
• You will make it easy for indirect channels to augment your product / services
offering with complementary products and value added services
• Your will ensure that your products / services deliver on their promise, that they are
of merchantable quality and reliable and encourage repeat purchases
• You will, throughout be easy to do business with and treat your channel indirect
channels with integrity and respect

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• You will facilitate collaboration between you and your channels and among your
channel communities
• You will communicate with them when, how and how often they choose to be
communicated with
• You will provide easy access to the information, tools and resources they need to
be successful
If you get the other This constitutes your channel value proposition. Many of these expectations depend
on having great products but if I had a Dollar for every time a company told me they had the
elements of the best products but they couldn’t motivate their channel to sell them, I’d be a very rich man
value proposition indeed! In fact if you get the other elements of the value proposition right and implement
right and them better than your competitors, it is entirely possible to have inferior products but a far
more dedicated and motivated channel than they do.
implement them
better than your We will discuss best practice in indirect channel program deliverables later in the eBook,
but at this point, there are two important principles to remember:
competitors,
it is entirely 4. The best recruitment campaign in the world will fail if your indirect channel program
possible to have is not compelling
inferior products 5. The notion of ‘build it and they will come’ - having the best program but failing to
market it and proactively and systematically drive recruitment will also fail
but a far more
dedicated and
motivated channel Recruitment Campaign
than they do.
You would not set out to recruit a sales person or marketer without first documenting the
following:
• For what purpose is the role being created?

• What is the context for the appointment?
• What are the goals, fiscal or otherwise of the individual to be hired?
• What resources will be made available to the individual to assist them in achieving
their goals?
• Which markets or customer segments should they be targeted upon?
• To whom do they report?
• How will their performance be monitored and reviewed?
• How will good performance be rewarded and poor performance punished?
• What compensation and benefits will be given?
• By what contractual obligations will employer and employee be bound?
• Why should the candidate join you instead of another company?

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You would also establish a candidate profile and a brief to the recruiter.
Similarly, you should not embark on an indirect channel recruitment campaign without
ensuring that you are clear on all of these points:
• Why are you looking to recruit new indirect channels?

• What does it mean for the indirect channels you already have?
• What is the context for the campaign?
• What do you want your new indirect channels to do for you?
• What targets will be set, if any?
• How will you establish joint business plans and ensure they are implemented?
• What resources will be made available to new indirect channels to assist them in
achieving your shared goals?
• Which markets or customer segments should they be targeted upon?
• How will the indirect channel make profit from the relationship and how much?
• What other benefits are on offer?
• Who will be responsible for managing the relationship? Who or what will be their
point of contact?
• How will their performance be monitored and reviewed?
• How will good performance be rewarded and poor performance punished?
• By what contractual obligations will company and indirect channel be bound?
• What makes your package of offerings better than any other company with whom
you are competing for the indirect channel’s attention?
• Which channels of communication will be used to drive the campaign?
Ultimately, your aim is the same - to recruit the best indirect channel organizations, sales
people and marketers to work, albeit indirectly for you to help you to take your products to
market at the expense and exclusion of your competition. If you think of it this way, your
recruitment campaign will proceed with greater vigor and purpose and both you and your
potential ‘candidates’ will have a much clearer understanding of your objectives.
Recruitment Process
Whether you adopt the ‘big bang’ approach of launching a new indirect channel program
with accompanying PR campaign or the more low-key approach of augmenting your
existing indirect channel-base as part of your existing program, it is important to preface
any communications with messages reinforcing the points above. You must set the context
of the recruitment, why you are doing it, what it will mean for you, what it will mean for

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existing indirect channels and most importantly what it will mean for and how it will benefit
your target indirect channels.
Putting the actual marketing communications activities to one side; we will deal with them
in later section, let’s turn our attention to creating a low cost and efficient means of inviting
indirect channels to join you and processing their applications.
Mediums
Email has been the de facto standard communication medium for many years but it is in
decline and also statistically weak in generating responses. Spam filters and security
software have exacerbated the problem. As we discussed earlier it is generally in decline.
Social media has, by contrast exploded in popularity as a communication medium. It has a
role in channel recruitment in three ways:
1. As a medium for promoting membership of your program in general terms

2. As a means of viral dissemination of your program and associated value proposition
3. As a means of new recruits re-messaging their participation in your program to their
own social networks
The first two can be achieved through any concerted social marketing campaign. The latter
requires the necessary social through-marketing technology such as Relayware.
Targeted Campaigns
Communications You must remember that in order to have whole companies to partner with you, you must
start by recruiting individuals – companies don’t form relationships with other companies –
should direct the people do.
individual ideally
It is essential therefore that you gather accurate contact information; names, job roles,
to an online or email addresses, social ID’s etc. of you are to target the right people with the right
mobile registration message. We discussed this in earlier chapters but here it is critical. Sales people will have
point. different motivations to join your program to those of a marketer or support person. You
must play to these motivations effectively in your communications if you are to succeed in
making your campaign above average in terms of response. This means that you will need
to engage in targeted and personalized campaigns using every conceivable
communication channel including online, email and social media, segmented by
organization type, market focus type and job role type and so on - communicating multiple
value propositions to each. This takes time and effort but the results will be worthwhile.
Communications should direct the individual ideally to an online or mobile registration

point within which you can gather more information about them, populate and enrich your
database whilst ascertaining if your judgment in inviting them to join you was correct. The

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same registration point must be available via your corporate website to catch stray
applicants that you may not have invited or who missed your recruitment campaign first
time around.
Since by now you will have devised your indirect channel selection and segmentation
criteria, you may now begin the process of mapping applicants against them and either
approving or rejecting their application. This can be an arduous and time consuming task
best automated especially if your campaign has been broad. Needless to say, ensure you
have the necessary systems and/or business processes in place before you begin.
On-Boarding
What you do in the Imagine going on a first date with someone in which you have a vague but as yet
unqualified interest and half way through your appetizer they start talking about taking a
weeks and months long vacation together or having children. “Slow down!” I hear you cry.
following
But indirect channel development is a lot like dating. Move too fast too soon and the
recruitment will set relationship may come to an abrupt end leaving you wondering what it was that you said or
the tone for the did wrong. Indirect channels tell me all too often about companies who initiated a
coming years. recruitment campaign promising a commitment to a long-term strategic partnership. They
committed to the provision of a range of benefits, information, tools and resources to help
them to profit from the relationship. But the minute they expressed their interest, the
company insisted on training them, certifying them, setting revenue targets and joint
business planning. They wanted them to close poorly qualified sales leads and register
deals. Incentive programs followed and meanwhile, they cried, “slow down!”
In signing up to your program, a new recruit has likely said to you:
• “I am interested in partnering with you. What now?”

• “I may have a short term requirement to sell your product but let’s see how this
goes.”
• “I bought into your value proposition but I need to see how you deliver.”
• “I like your story, now let’s experience the substance.”
• “I don’t like or I am losing interest in your competitor. Can you do any better?”
…or something similar. What you do in the coming weeks and months will set the tone for
the coming years. Prematurely introducing programs or initiatives that require the indirect
channel to make more commitment than they are ready to give or which require them to
make investments that you can’t or won’t match may turn them off. Before an indirect
channel can reasonably be expected to proactively sell or market your products, you need
to nurture them through a number of steps. Remember the relationship lifecycle we
discussed before:

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This illustrates the steps to consider:
• Before you can optimize indirect channel performance, you need to be able to
manage and measure performance,
• Before you can manage and measure performance, you need to be able to provide
adequate service and support to facilitate it,
• Before you can provide service and support for sales, marketing and customer
service activity, you need to facilitate collaboration in those and other areas,
• Before you can collaborate on sales, marketing and customer service, the indirect
channel must be sufficiently motivated and/or incentivized to work with you,
• Before you can incentivize and build loyalty with an indirect channel, you need to
have adequately developed and “enabled” them to perform the tasks that you
require of them,
• And before you enable them, you need to recruit and then on-board them so that
they feel sufficiently ready, willing and able to invest the time and resources
necessary.
Statistically, Going back to my earlier analogy, on-boarding is a courtship. A succession of small steps
taken at the indirect channel’s own pace towards a close and lasting indirect partnership in
indirect channels which both parties have made a significant investment of some sort. I’ve seen some a
who were well handful of well executed on-boarding strategies and they typically work something like this:
nurtured during the • Immediately after registration, send them portal and (if you have one) mobile app
first 6 months stay download instructions and login credentials together with a soft welcome pack
with you and go on • Prepare your portal and mobile app so that they display welcome content and a
to deliver higher short video tutorial “how to work with us” for the first-time visitor
performance for • Consider also a “how to use our online tools and resources” video tutorial
longer. • Invite them to update their profile and share their own interests in the partnership to
help your targeting
• If they don’t engage immediately, be prepared to follow up very frequently by
automated time-triggered mail, push-messaging and by telephone in those early
days while they still remember why they took the first step
• After the first portal or mobile visit, track their activity constantly. Apply scoring and
nurturing techniques to segment your channel base into usage / engagement /
activity-level groups and target them with communications designed to increase
activity
• Make ongoing use of time- and event-triggered communications, e.g. “they did X
today so in Y days, we’ll send them a communication about Z.” using email and
social updates

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• Use social media to deliver short “teaser” messages – video clips on YouTube,
Tweets and photos on Facebook but always take them from there to your portal to
access the “full story” where you can track their activity
• Introduce next steps at a pace that’s suitable to the usage / engagement / activity-
level group
• Introduce training gently. No tests, certification or anything too onerous at first. Get
them used to watching short, interesting video clips of no more than 5 minutes to
wet their appetite
• Ensure that there’s a tangible benefit for them in completing any task that is
consumptive of their time and resources
• Re-enforce the partnership value proposition regularly
• Ensure that portal / mobile content is tailored not just too indirect channel
organization and individual profile but to an individual’s usage / engagement /
activity-level. They should see content that feels like it was created for them or
people like them
• Content should be designed to encourage them to take the next step in the
relationship
• Encourage them to enrol in and interact with your communities
• Keep communicating regularly with messaging and content relevant to their usage
/ engagement / activity-level group designed to lead them into the next stage of the
partnership
• If they falter or appear to have lost interest, you may be moving too fast or too slowly
for them. Reengage directly and ask them for their feedback so that you may
understand what you can do better to help them to the next level
Effective on- Effective on-boarding costs time and money. But it’s worth every penny and every moment
you invest. Because if you fail to execute well, the rest of your program will typically have an
boarding costs audience of less than 20% of your indirect channel base. The remainder will fall by the
time and money. wayside and most likely they will be working proactively with your competitors. Statistically,
But it’s worth every indirect channels who were well nurtured during the first 6 months stay with you and go on
the deliver higher performance for longer. Key to long-term success however is how well
penny and every
you take the next step; enablement and development.
moment you
invest.

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Chapter 6: Enablement, Education and

Development
Unless a channel So now you have successfully recruited your preferred indirect channels. Now you have to
educate and develop their staff - sales, marketing and technical - to sell, market and
can be motivated support your products more effectively (ideally to the exclusion of competitive products).
to create or You must provide them with the skills and knowledge to adequately perform the functions
develop a market you had in mind for them when you recruited them. If your product is mature and advanced
in its lifecycle or one that has become a commodity, then you must at the very least impart
for a company
basic product knowledge and feature differentiators versus your competitors. If, however,
through the your product is earlier in its lifecycle or you require your channel to assist you in developing
adoption of a the market for it, then you will be required to provide them with much more.
highly restricted Because the approaches for indirect channel enablement differ so much according to the
distribution model, nature of the product being sold, we will examine these two scenarios separately.
higher margins or
other incentives,
Market Making
they would
typically prefer to Unless a channel can be motivated to create or develop a market for a company through
the adoption of a highly restricted distribution model, higher margins or other incentives,
leave this task to
they would typically prefer to leave this task to the company while simply fulfilling demand.
the vendor while The challenge for the company here is that among the channels’ greatest assets are its
simply fulfilling proximity to, relationship with and influence over the purchasing decisions of their
demand. customers. Hence it is difficult for a company to convince customers that they need to
invest in the latest technology by means of conventional marketing activity alone. The big
companies fair better here as they often benefit from direct-touch relationships with key
accounts. The rest, however, must educate their indirect channels to the same level as they
might educate their own staff.
The purpose of this step is not to discuss training content or methodology; this is neither
our expertise nor intention. Rather it is to share what we see as best practice in general
execution of this component of the indirect channel lifecycle and the programs that
address it. For example, let’s look first at training delivery for ‘market makers’. Ten years
ago, almost all training was delivered face-to-face in a classroom environment. Today
computer-based or online training delivery has superseded this for all but specialist
technical training. It’s easy to see why:
• Online training delivery has improved in variety, quality and accessibility

• Internet access and bandwidth now support the delivery of multi-media rich content
to any device
• Users are now well accustomed to using computers, mobile devices and the
internet for accessing multimedia entertainment and information

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• Standards have been established (SCORM) to which software and content

providers subscribe
• Specialist content and test creation software has become easier to obtain and use
and increased competition in the market has driven down the costs
• Few companies can now afford to operate in-house training functions or outsource
to 3rd parties
• Product lifecycles have become ever shorter meaning that training frequency has
necessarily increased
• Online delivery offers the flexibility and convenience of language, time and place
• Mobile technology offers even greater levels of convenience
Leading In summary, it’s easier, cheaper, more convenient and more accepted today. Leading
companies integrate online functionality with their portals through the use of B2B
companies collaboration and communication software to deliver and manage complex and frequently
integrate online changing training programs in multiple languages at any time and in any place. Others
functionality with utilize conventional Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) primarily designed for internal
training delivery although these often have significant limitations for external programs.
their portals
through the A critical component is verification of participation and knowledge transfer. Several
excellent content creation tools exist which not only generate the courseware but also the
use of B2B
testing materials and are capable of outputting test results. This facilitates online testing
collaboration and with questions in a wide variety of formats and test scoring. When implemented in
communication conjunction with an LMS or external collaboration and communication solution, this will
software. allow a company to track training participation, measure personal learning performance
and test results and aggregate these by individual to contribute towards personal
certification and, where this impacts company accreditation to manage this also.
Of course, such analysis can be extremely time-consuming if managed manually. We would

advocate some form of automation as detailed above if you have a significant number of
indirect channels. However, testing, certification and accreditation are excellent
collaboration tools and incentives to encourage indirect channels to learn to sell, market
and support for you during the market-making phase. What is more, if they are a
prerequisite for being able to perform these roles at all and meeting such criteria is
commercially viable for the indirect channels given the opportunities on offer, then they will
represent incentive enough to drive indirect channels to participate in your training
program. If the numbers don’t add up, then you may additionally need to consider some of
the methods detailed in the next section.
Fulfilment
Where your indirect channel is selling a volume product which is more mature, which has
become a commodity or has multiple competitors, one has to take a very different
approach to imparting knowledge. In this scenario, channel indirect channels often merely

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fulfil demand from their customers i.e. they sell what the customer wants to buy, they sell
what they have in stock, or else they sell what they know best.
No indirect This presents a company with some challenges. Principally, how to encourage indirect
channel staff to take valuable time to train on your product when:
channel training
program related to • Selling it does not represent an incremental sales or margin opportunity
commodity • They already understand the basic concepts of the product without your help
products will • They already know about and perhaps sell your competitors product
succeed unless the • The product may have a low unit value
channel can • They don’t currently sell or stock it
clearly see • The margins or incentives to sell competitor products are more attractive than yours
some tangible • Your demand generation activities do not generate enough ‘pull’ from their
customers
business or ideally
personal benefit In this scenario, conventional online training is not attractive to indirect channels and while
you may develop the most compelling training program with the most attractive and
associated with
entertaining multimedia courseware, time and time again, companies fail to attract trainees.
participating in.
You have to try much harder and you must give them a compelling reason to take the time
to learn about your products. Fortunately, some very successful programs in which
companies have used every trick in the book to drive indirect channel traffic to the training
section of their portal or mobile app.
The main methods are:
• Closed-loop marketing of product lifecycle events e.g. launch or refresh tied to

portal pages or mobile app containing passive learning materials
• Extensive use of social media for promotion leveraging YouTube for delivery
• Personal incentives - cash, voucher or gift - linked to both sales performance and
points earned through training participation
• Company incentives - rebates, margin or MDF linked to both sales performance and
numbers of trained staff
• Company or personal inclusion within lead generation program
• Availability of training content via mobile device and mobile apps for greater
convenience with in-app promotion
No indirect channel training program related to commodity products will succeed unless
the channel can clearly see some tangible business or ideally personal benefit associated
with participating in it.
Also critical to your success is the understanding of your audience. Sales people in
particular will rapidly lose interest if:

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• Accessing the training requires them to remember multiple login details and
passwords
• They need any cookies or widgets to be installed on their PC first
• The training courses are boring
• The training course are too long
• They can only access it on a PC – you must support tablets at the very least
• They can’t take a break and return later from where they left off
• They are not informed of their progress through the course on an ongoing basis e.g.
‘you are now on part 3 of 5’
• They have to sit a test for no clear reason
• The test is too difficult to pass
Keep it simple – Keep it simple - Inform and Reward. And do these things in a way in which they will be
appealing to your audience. Of course, addressing all of these needs and preparing the
inform and reward very best content is of no use if you lack the ability to track who attended which training
in ways that are module, at what time, whether the training was fully completed and whether sales
appealing to your increased as a result.
audience.

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Chapter 7: Indirect Channel Motivation and

Incentivization
By far the greatest Sales people sell for many reasons; their innate competitiveness, their desire to be the best,
a need to gain approval from their management and peers and their appetite for career
driver of sales advancement all play a part. But by far the greatest driver of sales activity is financial
activity is financial compensation and benefits. Hence when a company employs a direct sales force,
compensation and motivation is a relatively straightforward affair:
benefits. • Pay a competitive salary

• Pay attractive rates of commission on sales
• Offer a compelling package of benefits to the sales person and their family
But there are also several other less tangible sources of motivation:
• Provide them with desirable high quality products that offer competitive benefits
• Generate demand and channel it to them in the form of sales leads
• Own a strong brand behind which they can feel some sense of pride to unite or at
least form a positive personal attachment
• Provide them with the sales tools and resources necessary for them to do their job
• Minimize bureaucracy and red tape in order to be an easy company in which to
operate
• Celebrate and reward success
• Be seen to reward performers and punish / marginalize persistent failures
• Be prepared to offer additional incentives when the business requires its sales
people to go the extra mile
There are, of course many more but these are common to most companies. What is also
common is that your direct sales people have a contractual obligation to sell on your behalf
and yours alone. They are also obliged to meet your performance targets consistently or
else put their job at risk. What is more, you manage them, you direct their actions and
therefore their performance is itself a direct result of the effectiveness of your own
management.
But can these principles be applied to the motivation of an indirect channel where none of
these latter conditions apply? Well it is certainly the case that unless you are a market
leader, indirect channel management by coercion does not work. And if you are a market
leader, such coercion can only apply to the indirect channel’s business - not their individual
sales people. For example, you may penalize an indirect channel partner’s business by
offering fewer discounts and therefore less margin should they fail to meet your
accreditation criteria. But this penalty may not be felt by the individual sales person at all

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and if it is, faced with weaker margins and less competitive pricing, the sales person will
often sell a more attractive competitive product instead.
Hence, indirect channel sales people must be motivated and incentivized to sell your
products especially when, as is most often the case, competitive products are available for
them to sell. It goes without saying that indirect channel sales people are just as motivated
by money as your own but you have little or no influence over what they are paid or how
they are compensated. Interestingly however, if we review the list of less tangible
motivators above, we can see a direct correlation between the needs of direct and indirect
sales people from the company. It is through addressing these that you will have more
success in winning over your channel sales people.
Being the Company of Choice

Indirect channel Indirect channel sales people are like any other. They prefer to sell brands that they know
and trust and that require a minimal amount of selling to get the deal. They are also much
sales people are happier having the company create demand for their products in the market without having
like any other. to do all of the work themselves. With this in mind, here are a few recommendations:
They prefer to sell 6. Generate demand and be seen to do it. Whether your marketing budget is
brands that they $1,000 or $10,000,000 per month, give your channel advance notice of what you
know and trust will be marketing, to whom, when and via which medium. This makes it much easier
for them to capitalize on your activities with their customers. Give them the
and that require a
opportunity to leverage your marketing investment with sales and marketing efforts
minimal amount of their own. This sounds obvious but indirect channels are usually the last to find
of selling to get out about company campaigns! If you can share your campaign materials with them
the deal. and even let them customize and execute joint campaigns of their own, all the
better.
7. Allow brand-hijacking. Your branding campaigns do little to drive demand but

they do create brand awareness and brand association. Indirect channels will prefer
to work with companies whose brand values are closely aligned with their own or
where they can only aspire to have such brand values themselves. Quality,
reliability, innovation, performance, speed. Think about this because if your brand
image isn’t one that your channel may want to share, they will be less inclined to
proactively sell and market on your behalf. Share your branding campaigns with
your channel as well your demand generation campaigns. Let them hijack your
brand campaign and turn it into a direct demand generator by supporting co-
operative marketing activity.
8. Channel demand to your best indirect channels. When a customer is influenced

to buy as a result of your website or closed-loop marketing campaign, direct them
towards your indirect channels to fulfill that demand. If you don’t have an indirect
channel locator tool on your website yet - get one. Customers won’t dial your 0845

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number and hold for an agent to find out where they can buy, they may simply go
elsewhere. Modern indirect channel locators don’t just search on postcode. This is
because geographic proximity is only one profile attribute of many. Such a tool
needs to match customer size, horizontal and vertical market, product requirement,
value added services requirement and so on and it must search against your most
recent and most accurate indirect channel database. It should also offer the
customer a choice and notify the selected indirect channel(s) (with a lead) that a
referral has been made encouraging them to proactively follow it up.
9. Give the leads to closers. If your marketing campaigns generate sales leads,
make sure that they are given to the most appropriate person (a closer) within the
most appropriate indirect channel without delay. Impose an SLA for lead recipients
to respond and contact the customer and monitor the lead until it is closed whilst
offering your support to the indirect channel to close it. Reduce the amount of
manual intervention within the lead management process in your own company.
Celebrate success and reward closers with more leads.
10. Accept leads from indirect channels and reward their transparency. If an
indirect channel sales person registers deals in progress with you early in the sales
cycle, it allows you to offer support or intervene to help win them. Make the
registration process simple and available online. Make it easy for the indirect
channel to update deals and request physical or pricing support. If a deal is won,
reward the indirect channel generously and if someone else poaches the deal on
price, reward the registrant anyway. You probably wouldn’t have won it without
them. Some companies struggle to get indirect channels buy in for programs such
as this due to a lack of trust or motivation. Make it worth their while, apply your rules
for consistently and you will benefit from more new business, greater indirect
channel loyalty and a very comprehensive sales pipeline.
11. Keep it simple. In countless indirect channel satisfaction surveys, there are a
number of consistent stand-out comments made by indirect channels. They say
that they like to work with companies who are “easy to do business with”. There is
nothing wrong with being disciplined, well organized and even process-driven but
being bureaucratic and forcing your channel indirect channels to endure excessive
and painstaking administration or to jump through hoops unless absolutely
necessary will demoralize and de-motivate them. Before applying any practice to
your indirect channels or mandating any business process, think first if it will benefit
the indirect channel, consider alternatives and if none exist. Needless bureaucracy
is the preserve of the market leader. If you are not one, keep it simple!
12. Gameify the completion of tasks and achievement of milestones.
13. It’s nice to be nice. Your corporate culture and indirect channel-facing demeanor
matters too. Your channel indirect channels want to be treated with fairness,
respect and courtesy. And no-one likes an arrogant company. These things really
do matter and can make a significant impact upon the levels of motivation your
indirect channels exhibit towards working with you. As individuals we prefer

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working with people we like or who are like us. As companies, we should always
ensure that we are:
• Respectful
• Courteous
• Consistent
• Supportive
• Flexible
• Easy to contact
• Sales- and marketing-led
• Keen to “do a deal”
Show Me the Money

Deep down, so Many of us have airline frequent flyer card. When close to being relegated from a higher
tier, we can go to extraordinary lengths to make up the annual points total. And when the
many of us are airlines are having a slow quarter, we often help them out by taking them up on their offers
sales people at of double points or free upgrades. We don’t fly with any other airline unless there is no
heart and we alternative and we do all this because of a plastic card and a free cup of coffee on a
comfortable chair. But then deep down, so many of us are sales people at heart and we
respond well to
respond well to loyalty programs and incentives.
loyalty programs
14. Loyalty programs. Such schemes are by definition strategic. In other words,
and incentives.
such a program lasts for a long time or perhaps indefinitely and sets out to reward
indirect channels who are consistently loyal to your brand or product range over
time. There are a variety of different models most of which reward sales with points
and points with rewards of some sort:
• Gift catalogues
• Vouchers with a monetary value
• Vouchers for goods or services
• Credit or debit card accounts
All such schemes can work well and some are better suited to specific countries and
cultures than others. Success can be governed by local pay and conditions, type of
reward, threshold for entry and the time taken / effort expended to secure the all-
important first reward. But such programs can be incredibly expensive to operate,
promote and fulfil. There are many marketing agencies out there eagerly waiting to
take your money so consider automation in house before taking this route.
4. Incentives and promotions. Tactical campaigns can be much more effective at

helping to mould behavior amongst your channel where short term goals become
paramount e.g. selling out end of line product, supporting a product launch etc. But
you must be lightning fast and communicate directly with the channel sales people.

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Don’t rely on distributors or your channel account managers to do it - they won’t

unless there’s something in it for them as well and by the time they reach everyone
with the message, it will all be over. Tactical incentives are a great way of solving
short term problems or creating a buzz and increasing activity for a short period of
time but build them in under the umbrella of your strategic loyalty program and
don’t run them too frequently or too regularly.
5. Top performers. Years ago, when margin was more plentiful, companies used to
treat their top channel performers to no-expense-spared ‘business trips’ or
‘conferences’ in exotic places. The problem was that it was inevitably the same
faces every year and the events became clichéd thank-you’s for services rendered
rather than an effective incentive for greater performance. But rewarding top
performers can be effective if properly implemented and well communicated. It is
important to consider your objectives first though. What defines true success?
What really makes a difference to you? For example, is it better to reward an indirect
channel for winning new customers rather than simply selling the most to the one’s
you already had?
6. Investing in collaborative marketing. “MDF”, “soft dollars”, marketing rebate

- whatever you call it, it has a poor reputation for delivery of a good return on
investment and throughout the history of the industry, most has ended up propping
up channel balance sheets. So much so that companies have introduced many
restrictions, limitations or else withdrawn it all together. This is a mistake. It is also a
mistake to believe that administering such funds is difficult and time consuming. A
suitably-equipped external social collaboration and communication system can
manage these funds with ease and link in to both your financial systems to manage
accruals and credits and your portals to facilitate self-service funding applications,
approvals, redemptions and ROI reporting. Giving access to such funding in a
disciplined, controlled and administratively ‘low-impact’ manner will encourage
proper use and will facilitate comprehensive reporting and analysis to ensure your
get value for money and a good return whilst motivating your indirect channels.
2. Gameification. This quite modern term describes an incentivization methodology

that has been around for a while but which has become widespread since the advent
of social media and mobile devices. In this context it can be defined as:
• Applying game design thinking to non-game applications to make them more

engaging
• Bringing together game mechanics and marketing to create engagement and
solve problems
• Giving people challenges or missions to accomplish, tracking the progress,
giving them status, and giving them a reward
I have seen it used effectively to drive selling behavior but perhaps gamefication’s
biggest benefit is in encouraging indirect channel personnel to engage in more

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mundane but nevertheless important activities that help the vendor or the wider
ecosystem:
• Self-profiling
• Recruitment and onboarding
• Training
• Incentives
• Joint sales and marketing
• Community engagement
• Portal or mobile app usage
• Survey participation
Participation and completion of tasks can be rewarded in a number of ways for

example:
• Products
• Consumables
• Sales and marketing tools
• MDF or joint marketing $
• Community status in the form of a badge, such as identifying the winner as an
"expert”
• Early access to content
• VIP status at events
• One-on-one time with executives
Of course gameifying participation in your indirect channel program is incredibly

complex and requires a suitably equipped external collaboration and
communication solution like Relayware.
Being a Pleasure to Do Business With

We’re in the people Now I know what you’re thinking. “Is he for real?” But I am quite serious. Sometimes, when
the pressure is on, the market is tough and we just need to hit our revenue goals we forget
business and that as marketers and sellers we’re in the people business and people buy people. They
people buy people. also respond well to being treated with courtesy and respect, honesty and integrity. They
like working with people and companies who exhibit an interest in their wellbeing and
success and who in word and deed go out of their way to improve both. And they like to
work with people who are essentially and for want of a better word, “nice”.

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Building a reputation as a company that is a pleasure to do business with takes time but
word spreads fast especially since the advent of social networking. It requires you to
develop a culture in your company and an ethos within your workforce that acknowledges
that indirect channel employees are at least as important as customers and should be
treated as such. Of course with familiarity comes relaxation and the relationship matures
into camaraderie and teamwork but you have to earn this.
Unquestionably, those companies who have “partnering” in their DNA do far better with
leveraging the full potential of their indirect channels than those companies who do not
and those companies always score most highly in indirect channel satisfaction surveys.
Being a pleasure to do business with is sometimes the most powerful incentive of all when
it comes to maximizing channel performance.

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Chapter 8: Indirect Channel Collaboration
Proven Methods
The most In the 1990’s and 2000’s, collaboration with indirect channel networks centered squarely
around plugging the gaps - either extending a company’s reach into geographic, vertical or
significant change horizontal markets or else utilizing channel indirect channels as a means of augmenting a
to service and company’s capabilities where services were a key component of the solution required by
support the customer. In this way, companies gained a more complete offering and were able to
meet the needs of their customer wherever, whenever and however they were needed.
collaboration has
Collaboration has taken many forms, the four key areas have been:
been the ability for
• Education or learning
vendor’s to provide
• Professional or support services
access to
• Sales and pre-sales
information, tools
• Marketing
and resources to
service providers We covered learning collaboration in Chapter 4, so here we will cover the remaining three
plus the next generation of collaboration facilitated by companies for and among their
and their (field)
demand-side ecosystems.
service engineers.
Service and Support Collaboration

Of the three, undoubtedly the most consistently well implemented has been collaboration
in the provision of customer services. Starting first with break-fix warranty support by
resellers themselves and then over time migrating to such work being carried out by large
TPM’s.
The most significant change to service and support collaboration has been the ability for
vendor’s to provide access to information, tools and resources to service providers and
their (field) service engineers. With their multi-channel communication capability and
mobility solutions, external collaboration and communications systems can give personnel
instant access to vast amounts of multi-media content to support them in their jobs. Portals
and mobile apps accessing vast libraries of information, schematics and streaming video
have transformed the lives of support staff in the same way that the GPS has transformed
the lives of taxi drivers around the world.
Sales and marketing collaboration has been less consistently well executed and typically
with a number of stand-alone programs. I’ll cover the most common, good and bad.

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Sales Collaboration
Lead Management Programs

Converting Converting company generated demand into sales leads which can be distributed in a fair
and consistent manner to indirect channels most suited to close them has got to be one of
company the most basic initiatives to get right. Why? Because most companies spend a great deal of
generated demand money on marketing but, as we have explored in earlier sections of this document, when
into sales leads you go to market through an indirect channel it can be extremely difficult to assess whether
you are seeing a reasonable return on your investment. That’s because in general, you
which can be
don’t talk to the customer and you consequently do not know why they chose to buy your
distributed in a fair product. Most of the companies Relayware encounter still struggle with lead management
and consistent programs. The main stumbling blocks are:
manner to indirect • Lead qualification: How to qualify a lead on behalf of an indirect channel?
channels most • Indirect channel selection: Which indirect channel should get the lead?
suited to close • Lead distribution: How to issue the lead and to whom within the indirect channel?
them has got to be • Lead interaction: How would the indirect channel receive the lead, interact with it
one of the most and update it?
basic initiatives to • Lead tracking: How do I know if the indirect channel followed up the lead? Did they
get right. close it?
• SLA’s: What response times are needed and are reasonable? What to do if they’re
not met?
• Follow up: Who, when, what is the process, what are the prompts, what are the
actions?
• ROI analysis: Per campaign, how many leads generated, followed up, won, lost,
pending, time to close, value?
• Reporting and CRM: What did the customer buy? What else did they buy and will
they buy again?
Companies trying to manage lead management programs using CRM systems that are not
fit for purpose or worse, they manage the process with spreadsheets should expect results
that are predictable and disastrous:
• Poorly qualified or ‘cold’ leads being issued to the wrong person at the wrong
indirect channel
• Leads being given to the same ‘preferred’ indirect channels every time
• Poor response times
• Lack of follow up
• Poor or non-existent reporting

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• Poor ROI
Indirect channels are left wanting and companies feel cheated because their marketing
investment and the leads produced appear to deliver poor sales in return.
The simple answer is automation. There are a number of commercially available lead
management systems either as stand-alone solutions or as integrated offerings as part of a
PRM or external social collaboration and communication system that do a fine job. But if
automation is not an option then manual processes can be made to work on a small scale.
Some simple things to remember:
• DO formulate a detailed workflow for the process

• DO establish a clear set of business rules
• DO develop a detailed understanding of each of your indirect channel’s
geographical, technical, skills and market coverage limitations to ensure correct
lead-to-indirect channel matching
• DO define a consistent selection criteria to determine which leads go to which

indirect channels and on what basis
• DO insist on indirect channels signing up to SLA’s and response times

• DO insist on accurate and timely reporting
• DON’T distribute sales leads though your account manager’s unless they can
exercise some degree of indirect channel-agnosticism
• DON’T send leads to reseller principles or other top management, they will rarely
find their way to the sales team and if they do, they will have gone cold by then
• DON’T assume, check! Make sure you contact the customer shortly after
distributing the lead to ensure that they have been contacted and that their
experience was a positive one
Some of the most Some of the most sophisticated and the most successful programs involve automation,
allowing internal or 3rd party sales agents to be able use a PRM or external social
sophisticated and collaboration and communication system to drive the campaign management and
the most prospecting activity. They can create and document leads, build a sales pipeline, qualify
successful and then select the most appropriate sales person at the most appropriate indirect channel
to receive the lead and deliver it via the indirect channel portal and email. The lead can then
programs involve
be tracked through to closure and the indirect channel sales person is able to request
automation. support (e.g. special pricing) online and get that support within hours or minutes.
Furthermore, tracking and reporting is made easy and whilst managing the opportunity
from campaign to closure the company was able to effectively assess ROI.

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Deal Registration Programs

Providing channel indirect channels with a means to register and track their own deals or
leads with you is an excellent way of developing a holistic sales pipeline and forecasting
process whilst minimizing channel conflict and potentially rewarding indirect channel
loyalty and transparency. Such programs fail for a variety of reasons:
• Lack of publicity
• Lack of incentive for the indirect channel
• Inconsistent company behavior, disregard for incumbency and/or customer
preference leading to greater channel conflict
• Indirect channels able to register deals regardless of incumbency or customer
relationship
• No win - no reward for the registrant regardless of whether the company wins the
deal or not
The rewards for Whether automating the process or not, you will have to think long and hard about
workflow and business rules once more or else these programs can be costly failures and
deal registration create a great deal of channel dissatisfaction. The rewards have to be worthwhile and
have to be attractive - for example – an indirect channel sales person registers a deal with you and
worthwhile and drives the sale - the registrant could receive a reward even if the deal is ultimately won by a
competing indirect channel. All too often channel partners lose interest when a low cost
attractive.
competitor wins a deal on price when the registrant put in all the work and the company
refuses to pay out.
Deal registration must be quick, easy, accessible online and consistently executed by the
company. It needs to be marketed continuously to your indirect channels too otherwise
interest and activity will fade.
A word of warning though, deal registration programs can be almost impossible to manage
manually unless numbers of registrations are expected to be very small. The process of
validation, incumbency checking, approvals, closure verification and reward remuneration
can tie up significant administrative, sales and marketing resources very quickly and very
easily.
Renewals
Many of our customers are in the business of selling renewable software licenses or
subscription based services. Increasingly these are becoming one and the same with the
rapid growth in Cloud services. While the need to generate leads and new sales
opportunities is as critical for these companies as any other, they have the added
advantage of a (potentially) recurring revenue stream and the added challenge of
protecting it from attrition or “churn”. Churn not only wipes out recurring revenue, it kills
growth because few software companies have a business model that assumes a 100%+

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new business revenue year on year. Most are reliant upon a 50%+ retention of their
customers and their subscription fees just to stay afloat. Clearly, if churn > new business
revenue you are in trouble.
Most companies manage this quite well when they’re selling direct. The industry average
for retention seems to range widely from 60-80% according to the type of software and the
target market. In his excellent blog, Chaotic Flow, Joel York sets out metrics for Cloud
service / SaaS customer retention and sets a goal of 80%. Any less than that for a young
SaaS company and growth can be challenging.
Customers who Direct selling is the key here. The customer is yours and yours alone. All you have to do is
maintain their loyalty and keep the competition out. But for the purposes of this book, I’m
have empowered interested in companies who sell subscriptions through an indirect sales model. This is the
their indirect most common model in the B2B market and though many question the channel’s role in the
channels and sale of cloud services, I can tell you that the software companies we talk to think of little
else. What companies fail to acknowledge adequately in my opinion is the impact of the
involved them
relationship that their indirect channels have on their customers buying behavior –
proactively in the especially in the small and mid-sized enterprise market. Here the indirect channel can often
renewal process act as trusted adviser and for example in the hi-tech market as an extension of the IT
have typically department or as a substitute for an IT department entirely. Such customers may have less
loyalty to a given supplier than a consumer or large enterprise buyer and will very often
experienced view company marketing aimed at securing a renewal as something of an irritation or an
renewal rate irrelevance. Obviously much depends upon the nature of the product or service – complex,
increases mission critical systems or those with intensive use by large user communities have less to
worry about. But coincidentally and again in the hi-tech sector, SMB is the sector that is
exceeding 10
embracing the Cloud more than any other right now and many Cloud services, tools,
percentage points utilities and ‘background’ applications like security and storage are far more at risk.
year on year in
So you would think that companies would pay a great deal of attention to driving indirect
their first year with renewals wouldn’t you?
continued growth
Unfortunately, we have seen little evidence of this. As I say earlier, a great deal of effort
thereafter. goes into lead management and deal registration initiatives but these are focused entirely
on new business. Renewals are driven through a pull model in many cases. This is
disappointing and entirely avoidable. Due to the very nature of the business model,
subscriptions are:
• Predicable
• Associated with a named customer
• Associated with a named reseller / indirect channel
• Associated with set dates or timelines
• Typically managed in a system with a centralized database
These factors are the foundation for an easily automated program in which a company can:

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• Make information available to an indirect channel online all of the information they
need in relation to their customers and their subscriptions
• ‘Firewall’ customer information according to indirect channel incumbency
• Issue time- or event-triggered renewal reminders to incumbent indirect channels in
plenty of time prior to expiration
• Enable the indirect channel to manage the renewal as if it were a new sales
opportunity
• Associate discounts, rebates and rewards with successful closure of renewals
(which have an inherently higher margin due to the lower acquisition costs)
All of these things can be achieved by linking your external collaboration and
communication system to your subscription / licensing database via integration or data
loads. Relayware features an app in it’s sales collaboration suite that offers this very
functionality from Professional Edition and above.
In practice this segments your sales pipeline into three; company initiated new business
opportunities, indirect channel initiated new business opportunities (deals) and license /
subscription renewals; in other words new and recurring revenue. Customers who have
empowered their indirect channels and involved them proactively in the renewal process
have typically experienced renewal rate increases exceeding 10 percentage points year on
year in their first year with continued growth thereafter. So essentially, this is one of those
components of your B2B collaboration and communication strategy that becomes a must
simply because of the very high levels of ROI and the very short timescales in which they
can be realized.

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Marketing Collaboration
Joint Marketing
While we all know In its simplest form, this is providing marketing contacts within channel indirect channels
with advance information in relation to your own marketing campaigns and providing
that planning, access to marketing materials to enable them to run their own in parallel. Simple, but often
budgeting and poorly executed. In practice, indirect channels typically find out about company marketing
implementing any campaigns at around the same time that their customers do. While we all know that
planning, budgeting and implementing any marketing campaign can take many days or
marketing
weeks, companies most commonly leave their indirect channels with insufficient notice to
campaign can develop their own campaigns and run them concurrently. This is quite simply insane.
take many days or
Indirect channels are often eager to find new ways to communicate with their customers
weeks, companies and new messages to communicate to them. If they and you can leverage your collective
most commonly investment and your collective firepower simultaneously and with a consistent message
leave their indirect you have a chance to multiply your return on marketing investment significantly. What it
takes to succeed is for companies to see indirect channel marketing teams and marketing
channels with budgets as extensions of their own resources. Create a virtual marketing team or
insufficient notice community, protect your confidentiality with NDA’s if necessary but share information
to develop their about upcoming product launches, promotions, demand generation campaigns and even
branding campaigns by whatever means you have available.
own campaigns
and run them There are a number of tools on the market along with agencies able to support online co-
concurrently. branded collateral creation and these ensure that when an indirect channel does
participate in collaborative marketing, they can adhere to your brand, message and
creative look and feel which again serve to maximize impact for the company. Sub-
programs work best when linked to market development fund programs, such that the
company contributes toward the cost of co-op campaigns as and when they are
implemented in adherence with their own guidelines.
The key here though is timely communication and information sharing amongst your
channel indirect channel community. On this note, in our experience, company databases
of channel contacts on average hold less than one marketing contact per eight company
records! Remember, you can’t market through companies, only through people!

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Market Development Funds or MDF

In the 90’s and We talked about the pros and cons of MDF as an indirect channel incentivization tool in the
last chapter. Now let’s look at it as a practical facilitator for collaboration. Indirect channel
00’s, MDF became marketing budgets are geared around promoting the indirect channel and the things that
little more than a they sell to their own customers. Few channel partners are philanthropists so if they are
bribe. going to invest any portion of their own budget in promoting a company instead of
themselves, there will have to be a very good reason or else a financial contribution by the
company in question.
In the 90’s and 00’s, MDF became little more than a bribe. Most propped up the balance-
sheets of indirect channel who came to rely upon it to stay in profit. As margins fell for
companies and the need for greater financial transparency and compliance became more
critical, many companies tightened up the rules of MDF programs or stopped them
altogether.
Accrued MDF based upon a fixed percentage of sales can often be seen as an entitlement
and can become a contractual obligation for a company to provide it. Instead it should be a
discretionary fund to which channel indirect channels apply under strict guidelines for part
financing of activities deemed likely to generate sales directly or indirectly for the company.
It should be positioned as unlimited’ and an indirect channel should be able to utilize it as
often as they wish provided that a number of rules are applied:
• A company should look to pay no more than 50% towards any campaign or activity
• Criteria should be laid out under which the 50% will be paid subject to achievement
of agreed KPI’s
• Ideally campaigns or activities should be implemented through company-aligned

agencies through which they (and hence the indirect channel) may enjoy volume
discounts thereby minimizing the cost of the initiative to all
• Indirect channels should receive no payment from the company until after the
activity has been completed
• Indirect channels should demonstrate that they have achieved the prescribed KPI’s
and reimbursement should be made accordingly
• ROI should be tangible and measurable
We have worked with companies who have implemented such a scheme to replace an
accrual-based model. Their message: “more control but more available funds”. Naturally, if
the MDF spent delivered a better ROI than before then, by definition, this meant more sales
and hence more marketing budget. In reality, we saw significant reductions in fund
redemptions but a significant improvement in the quality and alignment of indirect channel-
led campaigns. Such campaigns were considerably more effective than before leading to
better results. A virtuous circle and one which has seen massively increased marketing
productivity from the indirect channels and massively decreased company costs whilst

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leaving the channel as a whole happy in the knowledge that unlimited funds are available to
them so long as they can demonstrate that they will spend them wisely.
Collaboration Among the Ecosystem

It has long been As we’ve said many times, the last decade has seen a surge in usage of web-based
personal and business networking services including the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn. It
the vision of some has long been the vision of some of the larger companies to be the catalyst for bringing
of the larger indirect channels with complementary skills and services together to encourage
companies to be collaboration not merely between company and indirect channel but also between all
constituent members of the indirect channel ecosystem for the purposes of delivering the
the catalyst for
most comprehensive solution to their collective customers wherever they are in the world.
bringing indirect
Big players like Microsoft and Cisco have launched initiatives in recent years to set the
channels with
trend yet over five years ago we presented at numerous channel-focused conferences on
complementary the topic of harnessing the power of the indirect channel ecosystem and leveraging the
skills and services web to do it. You don’t have to be Microsoft to achieve it either. But you do need the right
together to systems and tools.
encourage
collaboration for Building Networks
the purposes of Earlier we examined the evolution of the linear value chain between vendor, indirect
delivering the most channel and customer into today’s complex demand-side ecosystem. Within it, there are
comprehensive many businesses and huge numbers of employees engaged in marketing to, selling to and
supporting our customers. Many of them simply compete so collaboration is not on their
solution to their
mind. However many have the capability and desire to partner or at least selectively
collective engage in co-operation as the need arises when they themselves need to augment their
customers capabilities or extend their reach. Where else would they turn but to the very ecosystem of
wherever they are which they are a part?
in the world. But how do they do it? Where do they go to find a searchable database of companies
containing an objective assessment of their skills, competencies and their geographic and
market coverage? The answer is simple. By turning the basic principles of the age-old
partner locator that we spoke about earlier on its head you offer the ability for your indirect
channels to search for likely collaborators based on location, skillset, customer or market
focus and service offering and to be the facilitator of secure communication between them.
Network building tools like this should be a part of any external collaboration and
communication system.

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Facilitating Collaborative Conversations

Providing your Vendors have offered basic forums, blogs and information tools for some time as a
component of their indirect channel portals but few would describe them as being a
indirect channel resounding success. Many cheat and pose as members of their audience to stimulate
with the means to dialogue. Social media and social networking have changed expectations of these tools
form groups and and they have changed behaviors too.
engage in LinkedIn have done an excellent job of harnessing the power of a very large business social
collaborative network and allowing it to take on a life of its own. The provision of tools to allow individuals
to create discussion groups and then to invite people with common interests to join or else
discussions online
apply to join before engaging in collaborative discussions was a stroke of genius. It works -
via your portal or some of the time. By allowing individuals from all over the world with diverse interests to
via an app on a interact, share information, ideas and opinions, LinkedIn provides a great platform but
mobile device precisely because of the nature of their network, they have also provided a medium for
advertising and self-promotion. Many of the once invaluable groups to which I once
places you at the belonged have been hijacked by individuals who blatantly market their products or
center of the services to other group members. So I did what I am entitled to do – I left the groups along
network and with many others and moved on.
positions you as a LinkedIn showed us the way, but the execution does not work well in practice because the
facilitator of community is very open to start with. Imagine then a community made up of members from
ecosystem your demand-side ecosystem. Each individual or company has a role to play in the
ecosystem but none is a potential customer. They have valuable experiences and have a
collaboration. thirst for knowledge that could make them more successful in achieving their business
goals and servicing their customer. In a global, networked world in the depths of an
economic downturn, specialization and focusing on what you are good at and can make
money doing makes sense as does the forging of alliances with people and companies
with complementary qualities and skills.
So providing your indirect channel with the means to form groups and engage in
collaborative discussions online via your portal or via an app on a mobile device places you
at the center of the network and positions you as a facilitator of ecosystem collaboration.
Why Facilitate Collaboration?

I think it’s simple. We are living in the age of pervasive personal and business networking,
perpetual availability for interaction and inter-business collaboration. Never has it been
easier to identify and communicate with like-minded individuals and those with
complementary business models with which to indirect channel. And never before have we
all been so receptive to it. If the companies don’t make themselves the facilitator and sit at
the center of their indirect channel ecosystem; encouraging and enabling collaboration,
others will be only happy to do it for them.

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Chapter 9: Communication
Effective Communication is defined as “the process of conveying information from a sender to a
receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood
communication the same way by both sender and receiver.”
can be challenging
Effective communication can be challenging enough between two people who know each
enough between other well, who are familiar with each other’s thoughts, ideas and communication styles
two people who and who are in close physical proximity to each other. It becomes more difficult for a
know each other company attempting to communicate with the indirect channels with which it has the most
intimate of relationships. But what of the difficulties faced by countless companies who
well, but what of
must communicate daily with 100’s or 1000’s of indirect channels with whom they have
the difficulties only the most basic of relationships and about which they have little or no knowledge?
faced by countless
The tendencies are either to deluge indirect channels with daily generic email blasts,
companies who newsletters, announcements and direct mail in the vain hope that a handful might find them
must communicate of some interest or value or else do nothing and maintain “radio silence”. Not surprisingly
daily with 100’s or neither of these approaches ensures optimal indirect channel performance. In this
whitepaper, we will examine methods for improving your chances of turning indirect
1000’s of indirect
channel communications into sales.
channels with
whom they have
only the most Communication Strategy
basic of In most companies, the CMO is a member of the main board or executive management
relationships? team. The incumbent presides over and oversees the execution of the company’s
marketing strategy. Curiously, even in companies who sell entirely through indirect
channels, the individual responsible for the somewhat more complex task of marketing to,
through and with the indirect channel does not enjoy such a senior position in the
company. Very often, they do not even reside within the marketing organization at all.
This is unfortunate because it leads to a number of issues that I have come across time and
time again:
• Channel marketing is disenfranchised from corporate marketing

• Channel marketing is seen as a tactical activity and an extension of channel sales
and product marketing
• Channel marketing staff are often not party to nor are they made aware of strategic
marketing planning
• Channel marketing fails to communicate important and useful information
adequately or early enough to the channel to allow them to act upon it
• The channel fails to market collaboratively with companies - on message and on
time

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• Companies consequently fail to leverage their channel indirect channel’s marketing

resources and budgets effectively
• Since indirect channels fulfill the demand generated by company campaigns, the
company fails to maximize ROI on marketing spend
The publication of this eBook is unlikely to address the lack of organizational development
evident within most companies. However, recognizing the problem and taking steps to
minimize its impact would be good first steps.
Channel marketers should adopt the same approach to indirect channel communication as
their corporate brethren take to corporate marketing communications to customers, they
should develop a strategy, take a proactive rather than reactive stance and adopt an
approach most likely to maximize the effectiveness of their indirect channel communication
activities:
• Objective - What do you want to achieve through this or any indirect channel
communication?
• Selection and segmentation of receivers - Who do you want to target and why?
• Medium - What is the best means of delivering your message
• Message - What is the message?
• Syntax - What do you want to say?
• Semantics - How will you say it and how do you want it to be interpreted?
• Call to action - What do you want the receiver to do next?
• Response - What response do you want to solicit and how will it be made?
• Repetition and frequency - Will you repeat the message and if so when and how
often?

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Communication Objectives
Prior to creating While you can communicate with your indirect channels too infrequently, the opposite is
certainly also the case. As with all forms of communication, if you have nothing worthwhile
the message, it is to say, don’t say anything. Indirect channel communications must have a purpose each and
essential to every time. They must inform, educate or form a proposition of some sort. You must stop
determine who and think:
your audience will • Why are we communicating?

be and consider • What are we trying to achieve:
adapting your
o Quantitatively?
communication o Qualitatively?
according to your
audience.
Selection and Segmentation of Receivers
Your message must be relevant and interesting to your receiver. Therefore prior to creating
the message, it is essential to determine who your audience will be and consider adapting
your communication according to your audience:
• Restrict your audience to only those receivers for whom the specific message is
relevant
• Adapt the medium of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the syntax and / or the semantics of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the timing of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the call to action of the message so that it is relevant
This step can often be difficult for companies who lack sufficient personal profile data on
the individuals in their channel. It is common to hear of companies sending indirect channel
communications to the indirect channel principle or to the sales@ or info@ email address.
All of these are of negligible value and send out a poor impression of your level of indirect
channel intimacy. Quite simply, if you do not have a detailed, up to date indirect channel
database with multiple contacts in all disciplines for each of your indirect channels, your
communication strategy will at best deliver sub-optimal results.

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Medium
eMail
Social eMail has become the default communication method in business replacing the direct mail
communication piece of the past, However, while volumes continue to increase, figures showed that in
2011, email user numbers declined for the first time and this trend seems set to continue.
and instant
Social communication and instant messaging is now displacing and will continue to
messaging is now displace email at an accelerating rate in my view and I will discuss these mediums later. In
displacing and the meantime, email is still a key medium though making it an effective one is increasingly
will continue to difficult. To make it work properly for you, you need to:
displace email at • Ensure that you have accurate, up to date email addresses for individuals in your
an accelerating indirect channel community
rate. • Ensure that you have their permission to send mail to their private email address
(business addresses are generally exempt from DPA restrictions)
• Ensure that you have a means to dispatch sometimes large numbers of emails at
onetime
• Have a repeatable process for communication creation that avoids duplication of
effort
• Offer a means for the recipient to unsubscribe
• Make the title sufficiently compelling to ensure the mail is opened
• Keep the content short and present it in such a way as to make it look and sound
interesting
• Have a means of tracking the communication:
o Who did it go to?
o Who received it?
o From whom did you receive a “bounce-back” and why?
o Who opened and read it?
o Who responded to your call to action?
• Ensure your communications are not mistaken for spam

It is often worthwhile targeting selected sub-audiences with complementary
communications using other mediums such as telephone, social communication where a
more personal touch is required or where the message needs to be reinforced.

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Portals
Portals should be seen as the final destination and the medium for hosting the message in
Portals should be
its entirety. All other mediums should be used to direct traffic to your portal. This is
seen as the final important for two reasons:
destination and
• Your communication should be brief and to the point directing the indirect channel
the medium for through a call to action to visit your portal do take the next step:
hosting the
o Read
message in its
o Learn
entirety. o Sign-Up
o Download etc.
• Your portal contains so much more information of value to the indirect channel.
Use their visit resulting from your communication to retain them on the site a little
while longer to enable you to impart more information.
I will go into significantly more detail later on the topic of portals and their importance in
providing service and support to your channel together with advice on constructing them
and deploying them successfully.
Social Communication
We examined the statistical data supporting the argument that social networks and social
communications are displacing email in chapter 1. Social communication is inherently
many-to-many and collaborative and it requires recipients to have opted in to receive your
messages. There’s a lot of evidence to show that it is more often read and more often acted
upon than email.

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Company Pages
External social Obviously, email starts with the premise of messaging large numbers of people and
attempting to solicit interest in specific communications based upon relevance of content.
collaboration If the recipient merely decides not to unsubscribe from your communications, this does not
solutions like necessarily make them a fan! If you plan to use social networks to communicate, you need
Relayware allow to adopt an entirely different strategy. Remember, your aim is to encourage people to
engage with you and in so doing to expose them to your messages. For this to happen,
the creation of
they need to become a “follower”. In order to make them follow you, they have to know that
social groups but you are there to be followed so you will have to resort to some old fashioned and
restrict the contemporary techniques to do this:
audience to those • Announce via email that your company has a social presence and tell them why
within your they should follow you there and what you’ll be posting. Make it enticing
ecosystem and /or • Encourage or mandate employees to add links to your company pages in their
those actively email signature alerting people they interact with outside the company that your
company has a presence on social networks
participating in
your programs. • Use your existing social networks to announce that your company is there and
encourage them to share and like you
• Add social page links to your website and portals with clickable icons that makes it
easy to follow you
• Add social page links to printed collateral
• Add social page links to your mobile app(s)
Advertising
Some social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn offer paid advertising to promote
your company or channel page and attract likes and followers. You will need to be careful
to make the targeting as precise as possible in order to attract the right audience but
remember that once your page is out there, anyone can see it. Be prepared, your fan-base
may become quite diverse!
Collaborative Discussions
Some social networks like LinkedIn allow users to create communities or groups within the
network. You may then invite your target audience to join or they may join of their own
volition. Forming and managing these groups enables you to stimulate collaborative
discussions between members of your ecosystem while moderating membership and
content. Their disadvantage is that they take place in the social network rather than in your
own environment and limit your opportunities for self-promotion. Sadly, they’re also open
to hijacking by individuals more intent on promoting themselves.

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Some external social collaboration solutions like Relayware allow the creation of social
groups in a similar way but restrict the audience to those within your ecosystem and /or
those actively participating in your programs. This makes for tighter, more cohesive groups
and discussions on a narrower set of topics while allowing more depth in those
discussions. The groups can be more numerous, specialized and better tailored to your
ecosystem members.
Direct Social Communication
Targeted instant When registering your contacts or facilitating self-profiling, it is good practice to capture
their personal and company social ID’s. If you have an external social collaboration and
social messaging communication solution, this brings benefits for them:
is becoming a
• Enables them to login to your portals or other online or mobile tools using a single-
more common sign-on using with their social ID’s
medium • Saves them time and the need to memorize multiple ID’s and passwords
particularly when • Enables them to sync their social profiles with your database again saving time and
communicating effort
with sales people In turn it also brings benefits for you:
and where
• Makes registering quicker and easier so increases registrations and reduces
immediacy is abandonment rate
important. • Improves profile data accuracy and completeness
• Enables you to view social profiles for both company and individuals in your
external social collaboration and communication system
• Provides you with social contact data to facilitate direct social communications
This is a key last point because if you have the necessary social communications tools, you
will be able to send personalized social messages direct to the individual. It also means that
the individual’s interactions with you, your program and with others in the ecosystem can
be shared through automated social updates with the individual’s social networks. Finally,
messages can be re-communicated through the individual’s social accounts into their
social networks making them the medium itself.
Instant Messaging
SMS blasts became popular briefly a few years ago but since they were broadcast rather
than targeted, and have more recently been used for often malicious spam marketing they
have declined in popularity. Targeted instant social messaging is becoming a more
common medium particularly when communicating with sales people and where
immediacy is important. When this is combined with other mediums and tied into an
activity-stream interface on your portal and/or mobile app, it can be an excellent means of

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delivering targeted, timely information in such a way to attract the prompt attention of the
recipient.
Consider that portals often contain a great deal of static and often dated content that does
not solicit frequent visits but when an activity stream (recognizable to anyone familiar with
Facebook’s Timeline or LinkedIn’s homepage updates) is added, the site is brought
immediately to life. When such tools (available with external social collaboration and
communication solutions) are combined with a mobile app and mobile push-data
technology, notifications provide the recipient with a compelling reason to read your latest
messages.
Combining Mediums
Any effective marketing campaign combines mediums so none of the above should be
considered in isolation. Through combination, you can reach your audience whatever the
medium they prefer and wherever they may be when the message is sent.
The Importance of Data

If your database is It should be remembered that all mediums rely upon good contact information whether that
be telephone numbers, email addresses or social ID’s. I will stress again that this is the
inadequate or out biggest single source of failure. If your database is inadequate or out of date, you will fail to
of date, you will fail communicate effectively.
to communicate
effectively.
Message
Whatever the medium, the message consists of three basic elements:
• Syntax - What you say

• Semantics - How you say it and how you want it to be interpreted
• Call to action - What you want the receiver to do next
Syntax and Semantics

I will not attempt to use this eBook as a means of providing instruction on the use of the
English language but rather to look at practical ways of effectively targeting the message at
different audiences of receivers and of adapting the message itself to be more effective at
maximizing your chances of maximizing call to action response.
The best way to do this is with an example with which we will also look at some other
considerations relating to the message not covered elsewhere. If you intended to
communicate the launch of a new product for example, you could adopt any one or all of

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the following approaches to receiver selection and segmentation and message adaptation
for the communication:
• Restrict the audience to only those contacts within companies authorized to sell
the product
• Send the message out to field-based indirect channel staff. e.g. sales via IM, mail
and mobile to maximize the impact and immediacy
Whatever the Then in consideration of the message itself:
medium, the 1. Adapt the syntax of the message so that the message is relevant and interesting to:
message consists a. Sales people - features, functions, benefits and incentives etc.
of three basic b. Marketing people - media plan, availability of collateral, MDF accruals etc.
elements: syntax, c. Pre-sales - competitive benchmarking, whitepapers technical information etc.
d. Technical Support - Technical schematics, warranty policy, spare parts
semantics and call availability etc.
to action. e. Operations and purchasing - Pricing, part codes, options and accessories,
availability etc.
2. Adapt the semantics of the message:
f. Why should you sell this?

g. How should you market this?
h. Why should you recommend this to your customer?
i. How can you service and support this?
j. How can you buy and stock this?
How does timing impact on this? Could you adapt the timing of the communication to
maximize its effect?
• Operations and purchasing may need to know first so the part codes and pricing
can be set up on their ERP system
• Technical and pre-sales may need to know next so that they can undergo training
• Marketing may be next as they will need to plan media schedules and order
collateral etc.
Medium is important also:
• Emails should be kept brief, contain key information only and link to portals, social
pages, blogs, articles or other online mediums for more information
• LinkedIn updates and Facebook posts should also be brief and link to portals,
social pages, blogs, articles or other online mediums for more information. These
should contain a relevant image as this will be used by the social site to display
alongside the message to add interest

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• Don’t just copy and paste content from one social update to another. Dull,
business-like messages work on LinkedIn but they won’t win you fans on Facebook
– make it fun!
• Remember Twitter’s character limit if you want to avoid truncation
Call to Action
Always have a call Each and every communication must have a call to action. If the recipient must do no more
than read a message the chances of them retaining it and acting on it are small. If they must
to action whatever do something - make a conscious effort to take an action in order to:
it may be because
• Access more information
a communication
• Download a document
without one may
• Sign up for an incentive
well be forgotten in
• Order collateral
less time than it
• Order inventory
took to read it.
• Enrol for a training course
• Participate in a social activity
Or indeed in any way participate or interact with you they will remember the experience, it
will have an impact and the chances of them following through with the desired behavior
are much enhanced.
There is some parallel to be drawn here with the psychology of the “freebie”. If something is
free or if obtaining it requires no effort and / or no investment then it is perceived value is
low. By contrast, (and of course there is a fine line that you need to tread) if something
requires effort or investment to obtain then it must have a greater value.
In summary, always have a call to action whatever it may be because a communication

without one may well be forgotten in less time than it took to read it.
Response
When you deliver call to action, then you must also have in mind a desired response both in
terms of:
• Action - What do you want the receiver to do:

• Immediately?
• In future?
• Medium - How do you want them to respond?

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By implication, if you are going to communicate and any communication must have a call to
action then you must plan for the response and consider how you will:
• Receive it
• Monitor it
• Report upon it
• Act upon it
In practice, this ultimately means content creation within your portal because that will be
the ultimate destination of your audience if you get it right. It means making sure that the
information or functionality exists within your portal to easily satisfy the call to action, to act
upon it and to capture the interaction resulting from it.
Repetition and Frequency

Whether you send Whether you send out weekly updates, monthly newsletters or quarterly bulletins, consider
carefully how often your indirect channels want to hear from you. It is important that you
out weekly consider how many companies are contacting them daily, through what mediums and how
updates, monthly many different communications they are likely to receive and want to receive. Consider
newsletters or conducting research amongst your ecosystem before deciding for yourself. The results
may differ substantially!
quarterly bulletins,
consider carefully We think that communicating more than once per week by email is dangerous because it
increases the likelihood substantially of your messages being:
how often your
indirect channels • Ignored
want to hear • Read selectively
from you. • Categorized as “Junk Mail” and never read again
Send email sparingly and ensure that what you have to say is worth saying and interesting
to your audience. However, if you issue an important message to your indirect channels, it
is worth repeating it selectively to those who failed to respond to your call to action the first
time. This “second bite of the cherry” can often produce more results than your first
provided that you change the tone of the message to incorporate a more personal,
appealing or even pleading tone.
Other mediums can be used more frequently mainly because the audience will have opted
in to receive your messages.

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Chapter 10: Service & Support

Nurturing lower In this chapter we consider the best approaches for providing a service and support
offering to your channel indirect channels for which the investment required is
tiered indirect proportionate to the return yet the quality of offering is consistently high regardless of
channels to indirect channel status.
encourage growth
can be a difficult
Channel Segmentation Versus Quality of Service
and time-
consuming task; In an ideal world, indirect channel service and support should be provided in the spirit of
that’s why many European social welfare services - available to all, provided to a consistent standard and
free at the point of use. In practice, things rarely work out this way. In a previous chapter, we
companies simply looked at indirect channel selection and segmentation approaches leading to the
don’t bother or try. development of accreditation hierarchies. These same hierarchies are commonly used to
determine the nature and often the quality of service and support offered:
Segmentation Hierarchies and their Consequences
As we already discussed, this approach simply exacerbates the pareto effect - 80% or more
of a company’s business derived from 20% or less of the indirect channel base. This
appears to make perfect sense - higher tiered indirect channels get the best levels of
service and support and the greatest investment. Lower tiered indirect channels receive
the poorest service and the least investment. One could argue that this is only fair. However
the model makes a key and often flawed assumption; that indirect channels generating low
levels of sales today lack potential for growth. Making the same assumption about
customers would be unthinkable!
However, nurturing lower tiered indirect channels to encourage growth can be a difficult
and time consuming task. It is for this reason that many companies simply don’t bother to
try. But in difficult business and economic climates such as those we currently face, failure
to exploit all of the sales and marketing resources and opportunities available to you is
quite simply inexcusable. Our advice would be to invest in:

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• Profiling your lower tiers by applying balanced score-carding methodologies

• Building a comprehensive database of your entire ecosystem
• Segmenting your indirect channels based upon qualitative as well as quantitative
metrics
• Targeting those indirect channels with high growth potential
• Offering a consistently high quality of service and support to all regardless of tier
Delivering High Quality Yet Cost-Effective Service

and Support
When it comes to So-called “managed” accounts will always receive some form of direct (human) support.
What I will not attempt to do here is to discuss human indirect channel management best
managing what is practice as this is a topic best addressed by sales force development companies.
numerically at
Instead, let’s take a look at some of the means of supporting both managed and
least the largest “unmanaged” accounts while removing the stigma of the “disdained” and elevating their
portion of your profile and contribution.
ecosystem, there
When it comes to managing what is numerically at least the largest portion of your
really is only one ecosystem, there really is only one cost effective solution – full automation. All of the
cost effective information, tools and resources you offer have to be made easily and conveniently
solution – full available to your indirect channel online via portals and mobile apps. Relayware have built
and deployed some of the industry’s best and most successful “partner” portals and mobile
automation. apps. We don’t write content - our customers are the best at doing that - but we do advise
them on best practice in portal design and functionality to offer the best possible online
service and support. We also develop and market mobile apps that match them feature for
feature. Here are some tips that our customers have found useful.
Purposeful Portals
Registration
Registration for portal or program access needs to be quick and easy. You should facilitate
social network integration to support a single sign on capability and profile sharing. Data
capture should be phased to ensure that only critical information is gathered during the initial
registration process as this reduces abandonment rate (when your registrant gives up part
way through due to lack of time or motivation). Keep them informed about how lengthy this
process will be and how far through it they are by breaking it up into short steps with an on-
screen reminder of how far they are at any time. More information can be captured as part of
the social profile exchange or else in the course of your on-boarding process.

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Automate the approvals process by using your collaboration and communication system.
Ensure timely responses to the applicant and keep them updated throughout.
Self-Profiling
In order to maintain data quality in your database and improve the targeting and quality of
your communication, offer indirect channels access and editing rights to their profile data
so that they can maintain themselves. Make this easily accessible to them from the
homepage or as part of the navigation. Allow them to sync their social profiles with their
profile in your database as this saves them time and makes for a more accurate and better-
maintained profile for you. It also means that you capture their social ID’s for use later.
On-Boarding
Your portal needs As I discussed earlier in this book, on-boarding (similar to lead nurturing) is a critical step in
the development of your relationship. It is a process in which you will engage in a series of
to have the time, event and interaction-triggered communications with recent registrants to share with
capability to them the information they need and expose them to the tools and resources available to
present content them and to help them to make best use of them all as their knowledge and capabilities
increase. Your portal needs to have the capability to present content and experiences to
and experiences to
them as they progress through your on-boarding process and to do so intelligently and
your ecosystem as intuitively. For example, a simple on-boarding process might be keyed to portal visits:
they progress
15. Registration
through your on-
16. Follow up welcome email with login credentials
boarding process
17. Email advising them of your social network pages
and to do so
18. Social messages to “new starters” directed to welcome videos on the portal or
intelligently and YouTube
intuitively. 19. Email inviting them to download your mobile app with a link to your portal or the app
stores
20. Instant messages directing them to your product key features videos on the portal
or mobile app
21. Combination of communications using multiple mediums encouraging signing up
for your rewards program
22. Rewards program promotion of your training program offering bonus rewards
points
On-boarding processes can be as simple as this or far more complex based upon
combinations of responses depending upon whether your system can manage such
complexity.

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Networking
As we explored in earlier chapters, every ecosystem has interdependencies. Modern
indirect channel ecosystems often have a need to locate and interact with other members
of the ecosystem. You can provide an invaluable service by sharing your data and
providing search and location tools to enable individuals to find other channel partners by
location, capabilities, skills, expertise, market focus etc. and then connect or “network”
using your portal as a communication medium.
Activity Streams
Content should be There is no better way of keeping your portal content fresh than incorporating a live activity
stream in your homepage. Fresher content results in more frequent visits which are of
filtered according course one of your key objectives for any website. Your external collaboration and
to the profile of the communication solution should enable you to push any form of communication including:
visitor and the • Emails
visitor should be • Social communications
able to view the • Instant messages
entire • Social updates
communication, • Time- and event-triggered communications
share, like and • Alerts
follow both author
Content should be filtered according to the profile of the visitor and the visitor should be
and topic.
able to view the entire communication, share, like and follow both author and topic.
Collaborative Conversations
Some companies have tried to facilitate interaction between the members of their
ecosystems using portal-based forum tools. In practice, moderated forums just aren’t
terribly interesting to the members of your ecosystem. But as LinkedIn has proven, private
or public discussion groups are very popular – there are currently around 1.5 million of them
on LinkedIn! Create your own groups and allow your ecosystem members to create their
own on your portal. Allow them free-reign to engage in collaborative discussions and
above all listen and learn from the social interaction you are facilitating. Record the
interactions in your contact history and use the data to drive your own collaborative
engagement.
Online Learning and Certification

Face to face sales and marketing training is typically not practicable or cost effective these
days especially for unmanaged accounts but in its wake has been left a void. Some

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companies have made attempts to stretch legacy internal learning management systems to
support online indirect channel training but this presents a number of problems not least
the creation of yet another portal for indirect channels to use and one more database to
keep up to date. Leading indirect channel portals integrate e-learning with online testing
and certification management to deliver a full range of indirect channel training programs
including technical and pre-sales and manage the entire process from content
management through delivery and the management of complex accreditation mapping
and scoring. This ensures that indirect channels need only log in to one portal and all of
their information is maintained up to date within the same database.
Collaborative Business Planning

Conventional business plans are prepared once a year for your managed accounts by your
account managers in order to achieve their performance objectives. Once prepared, they
are rarely used in my experience. You can make the formulation of these plans a truly
collaborative exercise by preparing them using your external collaboration and
communication solution using templates. Your channel contacts can then review,
collaborate and update their own plans online via the portal and since you are working with
data rather than mere text files, you can use that data to measure performance dynamically
as the year progresses.
Lead Management
If you provide a Coupling your marketing, lead generation and sales activities with automated lead
distribution via the portal streamlines the process and delivers leads directly to the channel
means for indirect sales people best placed to close them. Additionally, if you provide a means for indirect
channels to channels to update lead status themselves online, they can keep you up to date and let you
update lead status know when sales are worn or lost. This also ensures that you can monitor performance and
ensure that closers receive more leads.
themselves online,
they can keep you
up to date and let Deal Registration
you know when Essentially, lead management in reverse, deal registration capabilities allows indirect
sales are won channels to register their own sales leads via your portal in exchange for some benefit or
reward. If their leads can be seamlessly deposited into your integrated sales pipeline and
or lost.
managed online is exactly the same way as your own leads, the process is streamlined,
kept constantly up to date and indirect channels can be rewarded for deals upon closure.
Deal registration also helps avoid channel conflict.

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Renewals
A renewal (e.g. policies, licenses or subscriptions) is essentially a time-triggered sales
opportunity already associated with an incumbent channel organization. You have this
information so you need to share it. Your channel is unlikely to keep tabs on renewal dates
but it is in your interests to do so. Ensure that your indirect channel receive timely advance
warnings of renewal dates and you will see an impressive rise in your renewal rates as well
and channel and customer satisfaction.
Locators
Link your corporate website to your collaboration and communication system’s database
to provide an intuitive indirect channel locator function that enables customers to match
their needs to the most appropriate indirect channel. Complete the loop by notifying the
relevant indirect channel immediately by delivering a lead with the customer’s information
to ensure that the opportunity is followed through. These “soft” leads are often less well
qualified but much appreciated by indirect channels.
Special Bid Support

Link your Another process renowned for being at times painfully slow, bureaucratic and inefficient is
the process of managing special pricing or bid support. Leading portals automate this
corporate website process by managing product catalogues and pricing, bid requests, hierarchical approvals
to your and imposing rules and controls. This once again enables indirect channels to use the
collaboration and portal as a one-stop-shop and enjoy a much more convenient, efficient and speedy
experience in supporting you in business development.
communication
system’s database
to provide an Marketing Tools and Management of Marketing Funding
intuitive indirect Many portals offer indirect channels the opportunity to download marketing materials,
channel locator brochures and presentations and a number of software or services companies have in
recent years offered plug-ins to facilitate online customized or co-branded marketing
function that
material creation. Best practice indirect channel portals integrate all of these capabilities
enables customers but additionally they facilitate full marketing collaboration between company and indirect
to match their channel. This can include the facility to accrue and manage MDF accounts, claim funds and
needs to the most make redemptions against approved marketing campaigns all enabled by integration with
the indirect channel database and other enterprise systems at the back end.
appropriate
indirect channel.
Events
You will want to invite your indirect channel to many events. Most will typically be online
these days but conferences, seminars and training events do still take place locally so the

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means to invite attendance and facilitate online registration and profiling via your portal is
essential. Of course webinar tools like Webex and GoToMeeting can support registration
processes of their own but their weakness is that the registration is not captured in your
contact history in either CRM or in your external collaboration system. Directing
registrations first through your portal ensures that you can capture attendee data and then
use this information for subsequent audience segmentation in marketing. You can also use
it to populate portal-based calendars if you have them.
Incentive and Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs and incentive campaigns are another program component often
outsourced to third parties by companies. Again, this results in multiple portals or websites,
manual processes, inconsistent data and poor indirect channel satisfaction. Additionally
the old-fashioned “points-mean-prizes” incentives just don’t work - rewarding as they so
often do, sales that would have been made anyway by people already actively selling.
High performance indirect channel portals support company and individual incentive and
loyalty programs as an integral component and because they share data with the full range
of collaborative sales, marketing, learning and support apps, they can support
gameification which is, as I discussed earlier, the latest, most cost effective and arguably
the most effective form of holistic incentivization for your ecosystem. Gameification works
by providing small and often token rewards for good behavior – reading a message,
clicking on a link, watching a video, downloading a document or taking a training course. A
reward might be nothing more than a social update, a label or an “expert” avatar for a social
persona but in the era of instant gratification, these often count for more than a TV or iPad
earned from 12 months of selling.

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Performance Monitoring and Management

Gameification You need to monitor the performance of your indirect channel at a macro level to ensure
that they are helping you achieve your goals. Similarly, they may be very interested to know
works by providing how they are performing at both an individual and a company level. If you have the data,
small and often share it. Placing performance dashboards on your portal that display data relating to the
token rewards for visitor in an attractive and easy-to-interpret way (preferably chart-based) is an excellent
way of engaging them in monitoring their own performance against targets set – either
good behavior –
formally in joint business plans or informally against their peer-group.
reading a
message, clicking
Persuasion Elements
on a link, watching
a video, As with any website, it is crucial to improve stickiness and the desire to explore the portal
and make use of its functionalities. This is best achieved by using persuasion elements and
downloading a
calls to action on every page. These CTA’s should be user and context- sensitive to ensure
document or that you maximize the chances of triggering a favorable response.
taking a training
course.
Social Features
As with any website, it is important to make every page and all content available to like,
share, rate and comment upon. Care must be taken to extend these features only to pages
and content that are unrestricted. However, since unauthorized viewers should be taken
(via hyperlink) through the login / registration screens, social sharing can act as an
effective viral recruitment tool.
User Specific Content

Indirect channels will be drawn to the portal and spend more time visiting it if they sense
that the content is tailored to their specific interests or needs. Ensure that your content
management system or external collaboration and communication solution can present
content based upon visitor profiles and that profiles are fully populated with personal
content preferences.

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Mobile Apps
Mobile apps are As much as possible, you should look to replicate all of the functionality you offer on your
portal if not all of the content. Mobile apps are tools and are useful in completing tasks
useful in requiring minimal data entry and searching for information as opposed to acting as vast
completing tasks repositories for that information. For this reason, having a mobile app that runs on the same
requiring minimal platform as your indirect channel database, collaboration apps and portal is a must. We will
now consider each of the portal functionalities and without repetition of the preceding portal
data entry and
section, how these should be adapted to function on smartphones and tablets.
searching for
information as
Mobile Registration
opposed to acting
as vast Some of the mobile app stores (most notably the Apple App Store) do not allow in-app
registration. This is best done via the portal or by linking out to portal registration pages
repositories for
optimized for a mobile browser. Again, considering the limitations of the device, keep the
that information. process short.
Mobile Self-Profiling
Mobile devices don’t lend themselves to intensive data entry and mistakes are easily made
so take advantage of social network profile syncing and portal-based self-profiling.
Mobile On-Boarding
Notifications are supported by most mobile OS’s are excellent ways to draw attention to an
update or call to action and work extremely well for onboarding processes using a mobile
device. The app itself makes an excellent delivery mechanism for streaming multi-media
content which is again ideal for this purpose.
Mobile Networking
This functionality should ideally be replicated from the portal to the mobile platform and
offers the added value of location-based services on the device.

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Mobile Activity Streams

Mobile devices Mobile devices are perfectly and arguably best suited to this form of communication tool.
The display of topic and headline only allows for more messages per screen with the option
make excellent to view the full message on a separate screen or link out to a mobile browser. The app can
platforms for also make great use of notifications supported by the OS to draw attention to new
viewing on- messages.
demand streaming
multimedia Mobile Collaborative Conversations
training material. This functionality should ideally be replicated from the portal to the mobile platform though
it works best on the larger screen of the tablet.
Mobile Learning and Certification

Mobile devices make excellent platforms for viewing on-demand streaming multimedia
training material. The key is to ensure that content is matched to and accessible based
upon the users profile and that it is easily searched, indexed, bookmarked and rated.
Mobile Collaborative Business Planning

This feature is best suited to the portal because it requires intensive data entry.
Mobile Lead Management, Deal Registration, Renewals and Bid

Support
Sales automation of this kind is perfectly suited to a mobile platform and offers the
immediacy that a sales rep is looking for – avoiding the need to return back to base and log
into a portal they can manage their sales pipeline dynamically and collaboratively while on
the move. Care should be taken to ensure that data entry is minimized as before and that
where more data is required, this can be completed on the portal at a later time.
Mobile Marketing Tools and Management of Marketing Funding

Access to marketing tools and marketing programs is not in my experience necessary on a
mobile device; these being predominantly office-based tasks and in the case of the latter,
data entry-intensive. However, access to multi-media files including brochures, data
sheets, technical specifications, images, schematics and video footage can be very useful
if easily searched, indexed, viewed in-app, bookmarked and rated.

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Mobile Events
This functionality should ideally be replicated from the portal to the mobile platform and
offers the added value of location-based services on the device.
Mobile Incentive and Loyalty Programs

Armed with The mobile device provides a perfect platform for incentive participation. In addition to
engaging in task-based games, unlocking and viewing multi-media content, delivering IR
notifications, code tokens and vouchers, the device’s inbuilt camera provides an excellent means for
activity streams capturing images, scanning documents and recording transactions all of which can be
and the ability to instantly transmitted and stored in your external collaboration and communication
solution’s database. Imagine the potential for point-of-sale incentives for retail channels
display dynamic
where receipts can be “scanned” and recorded at the checkout as proof of sale to verify
reports and transactions and customers and so to avoid the necessity for manual verification.
dashboards, the
mobile app Mobile Performance Monitoring and Management
provides an
Armed with notifications, activity streams and the ability to display dynamic reports and
excellent means of
dashboards, the mobile app provides an excellent means of keeping your channel aware of
keeping your their performance in real time.
channel aware of
their performance
Mobile Social Features
in real time.
As with your portal, it is important to make all content available to like, share, rate and
comment upon. Care must again be taken to extend these features only to content that is
unrestricted. But again, since unauthorized viewers should be taken (via hyperlink) through
the login / registration screens, social sharing can act as an effective viral recruitment tool.
Mobile User Specific Content

Indirect channels will be more likely to use your app if they sense that the content is tailored
to their specific interests or needs. So as with portal content, ensure that your external
collaboration and communication solution can present content based upon visitor profiles
and that profiles are fully populated with personal content preferences.

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Chapter 11: Performance Management and

Optimization
Introduction
Indirect channel Several times during this eBook, we have drawn comparisons between the business
practices adopted by companies for the management of their direct sales and marketing
performance operations and resources and those of their indirect or “channel” operations and
management is a resources. Consistently, such practices are more rigorous for the former than the latter and
process driven by not surprisingly they are typically far more effective in achieving business goals.
the company In the final chapter, we combine the last two steps in effective indirect channel lifecycle
which contributes management – managing and optimizing indirect channel performance. These are two
areas in which we have seen little evidence of companies applying performance
to the effective
management best practice to their indirect channel networks even when they adopt such
management of practices in the management of their own business and people. We have also noted that
indirect channel when companies are faced with poor indirect channel performance, their response is often
networks, indirect to resort to tactical incentivization or the recruitment of more indirect channels. We will
examine the reasons behind this behavior and explore alternative and more effective
channels and approaches.
individuals in order
to achieve high
levels of Definition
performance. Just as with performance management in a corporate sense, indirect channel performance
management should be:
• Strategic - it is about broader issues and longer-term goals

• Integrated - it should link various aspects of the business, people management,
and individuals and teams
It should incorporate:
• Performance improvement - throughout the indirect channel network, for

individual, organizational, segment or tier effectiveness
• Development - unless there is continuous development of individuals and

indirect channel organizations, indirect channel performance will not improve
• Managing behavior - ensuring that individuals and their organizations are

encouraged to behave in a way that allows and fosters better working relationships
between company, indirect channel and customer

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Indirect channel performance management is a tool to ensure that company channel

managers manage their indirect channel network effectively; that they ensure the indirect
channels they manage:
23. Know and understand what is expected of them

24. Have the skills and ability to deliver on these expectations
25. Are supported by the company to develop the capacity to meet these expectations
26. Are given feedback on their performance
27. Have the opportunity to discuss and contribute to collective aims and objectives
It is also about ensuring that managers themselves are aware of the impact of their own
behavior and the behavior of their indirect channel-facing representatives on the indirect
channels they manage and are encouraged to identify and exhibit positive behaviors.
Setting Performance Targets

Performance It is human nature to establish goals for ourselves and others that either cannot easily be
measured and hence performance is impossible to measure or else establish simplistic
measurement is
goals based upon metrics that are easy to measure and yet which may not provide an
the process of objective measure of performance. Many companies measure indirect channel
assessing performance based upon little more than revenue precisely because this can be relatively
progress toward easily determined from sales-out data sourced from their own systems or those of their
distributors and as we have seen from earlier steps in this series, revenue is only one
achieving measure. In setting targets for your indirect channels you must compromise and establish
predetermined targets in the same way as you would set them for yourself or your people:
goals.
• Specific - related to shared objectives
• Measurable - input - output - outcome
• Achievable - but also stretch the indirect channel organization
• Realistic - able to reach the target
• Timely and Timescaled - by when the target is to be achieved
In practice this means that targets must be based upon metrics that:
• Are important and have commercial impact for both parties

• Can be measured using information and systems available to you
• Have some historical pretext or are based on mutually agreed achievable
projections
• You both believe can be met
• Are aligned with your own fiscal timetable – FQ and / or FY

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The key is measurability. We will discuss effective ways of objective performance

management later.
Documentation and commitment is critical. A business plan for channel business drawn up
by a company in isolation and without the collaboration of the indirect channels is
worthless. A plan drawn up in collaboration with an indirect channel but to which they are
not committed or which offers no tangible commercial risk / reward for both parties is also
worthless. Indirect channel business plans must feature the following:
• Goals - quantitative, qualitative and mutual

• Strategy - clear plan of how the goals will be achieved
• Objectives - the specific initiatives to be undertaken
• Action Plans - assigned to people and with clear deadlines
• Timescales - timeframe for implementation and target deadlines
• Resource Plan - what resources will be required from both parties
• Investment Plan -what joint investment will be made
• Signatures - by directors from company and indirect channel
Measurement Anything less than this does not count as a joint business plan. If a company cannot or will
not invest the time and effort to develop these plans with at least that portion of the indirect
provides the basis channel network that generates 80% of the revenue, then any resulting revenue forecasts
for providing and can be little more than wishful thinking.
generating
feedback, and thus
Performance Measurement
can build the
platform for further Performance management is closely connected to Performance Measurement. They are
success or identify sometimes mistaken for each other. In careful usage, Performance Management is the
larger domain and includes Performance Measurement as a component.
where things are
going less well so Performance Measurement is the process of assessing progress toward achieving
predetermined goals. Performance Management is building on that process, adding the
that corrective relevant communication and action on the progress achieved against these predetermined
action can be goals.
taken.
To improve performance, you need to know what current performance is. Measurement
provides the basis for providing and generating feedback, and therefore can build the
platform for further success or identify where things are going less well so that corrective
action can be taken. But what gets measured? Measure the wrong things, perhaps simply
because they are easy to measure, and an entire performance management system can fall
into disrepute. Use too many measures and you can’t see the wood for the trees. For
measuring performance, the achievement of objectives, levels of competency, standards of

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performance and fiscal outputs are used but the emphasis varies according to indirect
channel type. Historically, most companies have applied performance measures to indirect
channels that are easy to measure – sales revenue, compliance with accreditation criteria
etc. Increasingly, however, leading companies are using more sophisticated measuring
techniques such as balanced scorecards or ROI (return on investment) analyses. But whilst
many companies now use balanced scorecards for managing personnel and operation
performance, few have adopted it for indirect channel performance management.
Balanced Scorecarding
In 1992, Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton introduced the balanced scorecard (BSC), a
concept for measuring a company’s activities in terms of its vision and strategies. It gives
managers a comprehensive view of the performance of a business.
It is a strategic management system that forces managers to focus on the important

performance metrics that drive success. It balances a financial perspective with customer,
internal process, and learning and growth perspectives.
The scorecard seeks to measure a business from the following perspectives:
• Financial perspective - measures reflecting financial performance

• Customer perspective - measures having a direct impact on customers
• Business process perspective - measures reflecting the performance of key
business processes
• Learning and growth perspective – measures describing the company’s learning

The specific measures within each of the perspectives are typically chosen to reflect the
drivers of the particular business. This method, whilst suitable and very effective at
providing a comprehensive view of the performance of one’s own business must be
adapted in order to measure the performance of an indirect channel.

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Balanced Scorecarding for Indirect Channels

The balanced In the programs we have developed for our clients, we tend to use the term “Indirect
Channel Relationship Assessment” in external communications – Indirect channels
scorecard (BSC), a don’t like to be “scored”!
concept for
measuring a
company’s Purpose of Scorecarding for Indirect Channels
activities in terms Scorecarding forces channel managers to focus on the performance metrics that drive
of its vision and success. In this context, it:
strategies. • Exposes strengths and weaknesses within the indirect channel at a macro and
individual level in all of the key areas
• Provides the basis of a relative ranking to compare and contrast performance of

one indirect channel versus another and against the best, worst and mean
• Establishes a set of performance benchmarks

• Highlights specific areas for improvement or development
• Provides an objective basis for the allocation of resources and benefits
• Drives joint business planning and implementation. In this context, when fully
deployed, the balanced scorecard or Indirect Channel Relationship Assessment
transforms strategic planning from an academic exercise into the formula for and
basis of your channel strategy.
Scorecarding forces channel managers to focus on the performance metrics that drive
success.

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Practical Applications of Indirect Channel Balanced

Scorecarding
Channel Strategy
The scorecard also The basic completed scorecard provides managers with the means to make strategic
decisions. For example, with regard to Coverage – does this channel indirect channel
provides an provide adequate coverage geographically and in terms of markets, customers and
invaluable products? If not, can they be encouraged or managed in order to do so or not? If not can
contribution to alternative or complementary channel indirect channels be found?
joint business Joint Business Planning

planning by
The scorecard also provides an invaluable contribution to joint business planning by
highlighting those highlighting those areas in which investment or development is required in order to
areas in which achieve mutual business goals.
investment or Channel Segmentation
development is
Once the channel indirect channel has been assessed in each of the key disciplines (the ‘5
required in order to
C’s), a total score can be calculated and mapped against the sixth ‘C’ – Contribution in
achieve mutual terms of revenue, profit or both.
business goals.
Mapping Scorecard Value Against Contribution
Channel organizations who map within the upper right hand quadrant are those who are of
greatest strategic importance. They typically account for less than 5% of your total channel
base by volume. Those who appear in the bottom right or upper left quadrants should be
the focus of targeted investment and development activity driven by joint business plans.
Any channel organization that appears in the bottom left hand quadrant should be

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assessed for suitability and or viability. Their presence here usually indicates that they
should be replaced and/or alternatives or additions found.
Accreditation
We covered this topic in an earlier chapter when considering channel segmentation.
Accreditation is a means of labelling an indirect channel organization based upon
satisfaction of accreditation criteria. It was once seen as a form of company endorsement
and some sort of guarantee of technical competence and quality.
Channel accreditation schemes have become less and less useful and relevant in recent
years as technology has become increasingly commoditized and customers and channels
have become increasingly technically competent. They should only be considered when
accreditation is considered valuable to the channel, the customer or ideally to both.
Accreditation is a Where accreditation is considered valuable, the scorecard quadrant mapping in figure 10
can be used to generate a three or four tier hierarchy based upon a balanced scorecard
means of labelling which may be based upon the ‘5 C’s – for a holistic performance-based assessment or
an indirect channel upon other criteria, for example technical competency in given areas.
organization
based upon their
satisfaction of
accreditation
criteria.
Mapping Scorecard Value Against Contribution
Channel Program Hierarchy

It is increasingly considered good practice to use the accreditation hierarchy approach
shown below to create an internal rather than external hierarchical structure. This can then
be aligned with the allocation of resources, investment, commercial conditions and
program benefits or deliverables.

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Converting Scorecard Quadrants into a Segmentation Model
Automating Indirect Channel Balanced Scorecarding

Auto-scorecarding Some external collaboration and communication solution systems (Relayware included) or
PRM systems have integrated scorecarding functionality. Relayware is aligned as standard
can be used to (though it can be reconfigured to you own design) around the 6 C’s model. Once
drive a range of weightings have been applied, the system will analyze the available data and score each
further processes indirect channel accordingly. Data is presented in detailed reports, easy to read charts and
dashboards.
including pricing,
commercial An external collaboration and communication or a PRM solution makes scorecarding quick
and easy and the process can be repeated as frequently as you wish. Analysis is automated
conditions,
and the output presented in a variety of easy-to-read formats to enable you to make rapid
accreditation, and well-substantiated business decisions.
training and
Relayware’s auto-scorecarding can be used to drive a range of further processes including
strategic business pricing, commercial conditions, accreditation, training and strategic business planning.
planning.

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Alternative Methods of Indirect Channel Balanced

Scorecarding
When the It’s important to clearly define your scorecard criteria for each of the 6 C’s and then decide
weightings for each.
scorecards are
complete, you will
be able to chart the
results in order to
assess the relative
strengths and
weaknesses of
each channel
organization in
each area.
Manual Scorecarding
The weightings are crucial because while you may have many criteria not all are equally
important. You will need to train your Channel Account Managers via workshops in
scorecarding methodology to ensure that the scoring process is applied in as consistent a
way as possible. Many of the metrics are qualitative and / or subjective so you will need to
try hard to remove personal opinion or prejudice in order to get an objective assessment.
When the scorecards are complete, you will be able to chart the results in order to assess
the relative strengths and weaknesses of each channel organization in each area.

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Manual Scorecarding Analysis: Plotting the 5 C’s
By plotting the By plotting the 5C’s against Contribution, you can go on to complete full scorecard
mapping in quadrant form as I described earlier.
5C’s against
Contribution, you
can go on to
complete full
scorecard
mapping in
quadrant form.
Manual Scorecarding Mapping Results

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You can then go on to segment your indirect channels to assist in your decision making
processes including collaboration methodology, pricing, commercial conditions,
accreditation, training and strategic business planning.
Converting Scorecard Quadrants into a Segmentation Model
Optimizing and Rewarding Performance

Taking the final. Performance optimization can be achieved through a combination of ‘carrot and stick’. In
this context that is to say:
punitive measures
with consistent • Providing indirect channels with the tools, resources and development necessary
to improve performance.
poor performers is
as important as • Rewarding them for good performance and providing ongoing support to promote
further improvement.
rewarding and
investing in • Penalizing them for poor performance and, where potential for improvement has
been identified, providing ongoing support to promote further improvement.
performers.
• Penalizing them for poor performance and, where potential for improvement has
not been identified, taking positive action to de-commit further resources and
investment or terminating the relationship
Taking the final punitive measures with consistent poor performers is as important as
rewarding and investing in performers. Companies must, after all invest their limited

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resources where they can deliver the greatest return. But this step should only be taken
following an objective analysis ideally through scorecarding.
Developing a High Performance Channel

All companies Throughout this book, we have already examined in detail the core components of indirect
channel collaboration and communication as a strategy and methodology. In brief,
have a engaging in ecosystem social collaboration and multi-channel communication as a
fundamental strategy addresses every phase of the indirect channel lifecycle:
responsibility to
develop their
channel for the
future, not merely
to reward it for the
past.
The Indirect channel Lifecycle
By implementing a social collaboration strategy for their indirect channel, a company

commits to engage in:
• Ongoing communication and knowledge sharing with the indirect channel network
• Ongoing training and development of individual and organizational skills and
competencies
• Ongoing motivation, incentivization and loyalty building
• Fostering sales, marketing, support and operational collaboration between indirect
channel and company and across the wider indirect channel network
• Providing an effective and high quality support infrastructure to the indirect
channel network
• Working collaboratively in planning for and achieving success against joint targets

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All companies have a fundamental responsibility to develop their channel for the future, not
merely to reward it for the past.
Rewarding a High Performance Channel

By combining Personnel performance management is often linked with performance-related pay (PRP),
although by no means all organizations claiming to use performance management have
performance- PRP. Nevertheless, PRP is an important element in many performance management
based and schemes because it is believed to motivate; it is said to deliver the message that
competence- performance and competence are important, and it is thought to be fair to reward people
according to their performance, contribution or competence.
based it is possible
to operate a A similar approach is often used with indirect channel performance management where
performance-related discounts or rebates are made available according to an indirect
contribution-
channels performance against defined targets. Sometimes this is governed by attainment
related pay of accreditation criteria but all too often these criteria are too narrow and restricted only to
scheme which those metrics that can easily be measured. This means that accreditation is usually based
means paying for on subjective assessments of performance, and that a performance-related discount or
rebating policy can often inhibit collaboration because of its individualistic nature, and
results plus occasionally lead to ‘short-termism’.
competence, and
An alternative to PRP for personnel is competence-related pay, which provides for pay
for past
progression to be linked to levels of competence that people have achieved, using a
performance and competence profile or framework. By combining performance-based and competence-
future success. based it is possible to operate contribution-related pay scheme which means paying for
results plus competence, and for past performance and future success. This is precisely
the model supported by indirect channel scorecarding and indeed indirect channel
scorecarding offers the only methodology for contribution-based discounts, rebates or
rewards for indirect channels.

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Summary
In the coming months and possibly years, we will all be challenged to maintain and grow
revenues, reduce costs and improve profitability while acquiring new customers and
maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction; all this while battling the worst economic
downturn in living memory. Companies who succeed in this climate and during what will
doubtless be a slow recovery period will be those who find efficient and economical ways
to gain competitive advantage and leverage it. If your company sells direct, then continue
to invest in and develop your CRM, MA and workforce collaboration strategies to drive
demand, tightly manage your sales activities and improve internal productivity. However, if
you sell through an indirect sales channel or operate a multi-channel go-to-market strategy
then consider implementing a complementary external social collaboration and
communication strategy to improve the productivity of your demand-side ecosystem and
address every phase of the indirect channel lifecycle:
Selection
Ensure that the indirect channels you have are the ones you need now and in the future to
maintain and grow your business. Build a detailed profile on each of the companies to ensure
that you have an intimate knowledge of your ecosystem and the sales, marketing and other
resources they employ and who represent you in front of your customers.
Segmentation and Accreditation

Don’t implement accreditation programs for the sake of it. Make sure there is tangible value
for everyone and don’t create disaffected 2nd and 3rd class citizens among your indirect
channel network. Instead, consider utilizing the knowledge you have amassed to segment
your ecosystem into circles and groups with shared attributes to improve targeting, go-to-
market execution and communication. Segmentation is critical because it aligns your
channels to market with the market’s you want to serve while ensuring more effective and
productive communication.
Recruitment and On-boarding

Embark on a recruitment initiative only after analyzing your existing base to assess their
potential. It may be easier to re-activate a dormant account or contact than it will be to attract
an entirely new one. Recruit new indirect channels according to your selection criteria and
then only in parallel with a balanced score-carding methodology. Recruitment isn’t a
numbers game in which you recruit as many people as possible in the hope that some of them

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work out. Recruit indirect channels with the same care and conviction as you would apply if
recruiting new staff.
Once recruited, nurture them as you would a prospect customer. Take them on a journey of
discovery and enlightenment that alters direction according to their behaviour and
interaction. Communicate often and provide easy access to easily-digestible information,
tools and resources through as many mediums of communication as possible while you learn
your audience’s communication preferences. Make them feel valued and wanted as you
encourage them to the next stage in your relationship.
Development and Enablement

Channel. Channel enablement, training and development are one of the most impactful elements of
an indirect channel program and yet one of the least well executed by companies. The
enablement, secrets to success are:
training and
1. Recognize that learning is a collaborative process
development are
2. Understand your target audience’s behaviors, preferences and needs
one of the most
3. Realize that indirect channels largely don’t want or need to be trained by the
impactful elements company in order to do their job and earn a living
of an indirect 4. Provide a suitable delivery medium
channel program 5. Ensure that you can effectively test or validate training participation or knowledge
and yet one of the transfer
least well executed 6. Be able to instantly translate training participation into certification and
by companies. accreditation outcomes
7. Incentivize or reward indirect channels for training
8. Link training-related incentives into program-wide individual or company incentive
and reward schemes. Gameify of possible.
9. Deploy and utilize the infrastructure and systems to execute effectively and
efficiently
Point (9) is as critical to your success as it currently is to the failure of most companies in this
area. Automation facilitates the simplification of the complex and indirect channel training
and enablement is inherently complex yet incredibly rewarding if done well.
Motivation and Incentivization

Sales people typically respond well to being highly motivated and incentivized to sell. Indirect
channel sales people are no different but don’t forget that motivation and sales-person loyalty
has to be earned as well as bought so concentrate on providing high quality support and

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behaving in a consistent, predictable and supportive way towards them. Don’t just focus on
rewarding selling behaviors. Other activities are critical in nurturing and developing effective
sales, marketing and support people so gameify all aspects of your program and reward all
forms of collaboration including onboarding steps, training, deal registration, participation in
collaborative discussions and communication response.
Communication
Indirect channel communications are arguably as important if not more important than the
communications you initiate with your target customers. You should ensure that you take a
strategic approach to planning and execution of indirect channel communications to
maximize your impact and your likely return on investment. Ensure that you have the
capability to communicate through every medium; email, web, social, messaging and
mobile and make sure you allow your audience to opt in to the channels they prefer. Tailor
syntax, semantics and calls to action to the medium and the response mechanism.
Collaboration
Indirect channel Going to market through an indirect channel requires a culture of collaboration to pervade
through your organization. Your channel doesn’t market sell or support your customers for
performance you, they do these things with you. Don’t expect your indirect channel network to do all of the
management is work for you or in spite of you. Provide them with all of the tools, information and resources
about establishing you would afford your own team. Let them benefit from your marketing activities with a steady
flow of suitable qualified leads, reward them for bringing opportunities to you and establish
a culture in which
robust ROI-focused programs for co-op marketing. Sell together, market together and
both company and support together.
indirect channels
take responsibility
for the continuous
Service and Support
improvement of Today, companies are recognizing the importance of ensuring that their indirect channels
business are as well informed as their own staff and that they are provided with the resources they
need to an equal standard. Successful companies are making substantial improvements
processes and of
not only the content of portals but by replacing them with interactive web apps they are
their own skills, also making them “self-service” collaborative sales and marketing assets for indirect
behavior and channels. They are now looking to complement them with sophisticated mobile apps that
contributions. offer similar features and functionality while offering portability, mobility and instant access.
In so doing they have recognized the importance and indeed the necessity of deploying
their portals and mobile apps upon an integrated external collaboration and
communication platform and providing an environment for real 24x7 ecosystem
collaboration.

Relayware eBook
Performance Management & Optimization

Indirect channel performance management is about establishing a culture in which both
company and indirect channels take responsibility for the continuous improvement of
business processes and of their own skills, behavior and contributions. It is about sharing
expectations. Companies must clarify what they expect indirect channels to do; likewise
indirect channels can communicate their expectations of the company in terms of tools,
resourcing and support. It follows that indirect channel performance management is about
interrelationships and about improving the quality of relationships at all levels between the
company and the indirect channel and indeed between members of the indirect channel
ecosystem and is therefore a joint process. It is also about planning - defining expectations
expressed as targets or objectives and in business plans - and about measurement; the old
dictum is ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. It is a continuous process, not a one-
off event. Last but not least, it is holistic and should pervade every aspect of running an
indirect channel to market.
And Finally…
The greatest I have made a life, a career, a product, a business and a hobby out of effectively managing,
productivity gains leveraging and optimizing indirect sales channels. It is inherently difficult, much maligned
and totally misunderstood by most senior executives. And it is precisely for these reasons
and hence revenue that I still enjoy doing it, talking about it and writing about it after all these years.
gains can be
Like any poorly understood practice, executing a few basic principles well and adhering to a
derived from handful of golden rules can produce amazing results that to those less well informed can
collaboration appear to be almost magical. I hope I have given you enough ideas in this book to go and
beyond the work some magic of your own.
enterprise. Let me leave you with one final thought. Few executives will argue with the concept of
improved workforce collaboration resulting in increased workforce productivity within their
enterprise. If your company goes to market through an ecosystem of indirect channels, how
then can your executives argue with the notion that the greatest productivity and hence the
greatest revenue gains can be derived from collaboration beyond the enterprise.
Spread the word.

Relayware eBook
Additional Information
Additional information regarding indirect channel collaboration and communication and
associated business processes and systems can be found on our website at
http://www.relayware.com along with a detailed overview of how the Relayware external
collaboration and communication solution can automate every phase of the indirect
channel lifecycle and every component of your indirect channel program.
Relayware, Inc. Relayware Ltd. Collaborate Beyond the Enterprise

303 Twin Dolphin Drive The Magdalen Centre
6th Floor The Oxford Science Park Follow and recommend Relayware:
Redwood Shores Oxford
California 94065 OX4 4GA
USA United Kingdom
Tel: 1 650 351 9150 Tel: +44 (0)1865 784 920

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Collaborate beyond the enterprise

The Definitive Guide to External Social Collaboration

eBook from Relayware

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 1 of 113

Chapter 1: External Social Collaboration and Communication in Business 13

Chapter 2: Business Social Collaboration and Communication Technologies 21

Chapter 3: Selecting Your Ecosystem 37

Chapter 4: Segmentation, Accreditation and Tiering 40

Chapter 5: Indirect Channel Recruitment 46

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 2 of 113

Chapter 6: Enablement, Education and Development 53

Chapter 7: Indirect Channel Motivation and Incentivization 57

Chapter 8: Indirect Channel Collaboration 64

Chapter 10: Service & Support 85

Chapter 11: Performance Management and Optimization 96

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 3 of 113

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 4 of 113

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Why Sell Through an Indirect Channel?

Challenges Posed by an Indirect Channel Model

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Traditional Simplistic Interpretation of a Hybrid Channel Structure

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Another Indirect Channel Challenge – The Pareto Principle

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The Nature of the Relationship

The Indirect Channel Lifecycle

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An Example of a Demand-Side Ecosystem

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• Indirect channel needs, expectations and behaviors are changing

With so many challenges, it would be easy and understandable if businesses gave up

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 12 of 113

Chapter 1: External Social Collaboration and

Rate of Adoption of Communication Technology – Time to 50 Million Users

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 13 of 113

Changing Demographic of Social Technology Usage as % of Total

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Luis Suarez of IBM Abandons eMail

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Atos Phases Out eMail

After two decades

Communications are Shifting from Email and IM to Social

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 16 of 113

The Rise of Social Technologies

Business Adoption of Social Technologies Lags Behind Consumer

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 17 of 113

% of Companies By Sector Using Web 2.0 Social Tools

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How Well Companies Benefit from Social Technologies Depends Upon

Value Potential and Ease of Capture Through Social Technologies by Sector

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 19 of 113

Imagine the impact on your enterprise of implementing social and collaborative

Improved Collaboration and Communication Through Social Technology

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 20 of 113

Chapter 2: Business Social Collaboration and

McKinsey define social technologies as digital technologies used by people to interact

1. They are enabled by information technology.

© Relayware, Inc. 2013 www.relayware.com Page 21 of 113

3. They enable distributed access to consume content and communications.

1. They are enabled by information technology.

The juxtaposition of social and collaboration technology is clearly well-suited to the