Channel Management Best Practices: Channel Data Management (9/x)

In order to both share my perspective and (perhaps more importantly) to elicit constructive feedback and new ways of thinking, I am writing a series of posts giving my perspective on the best practices of Channel Management.  These are things that I have learned and have implemented with success in my career.  Comments, feedback, disagreements, and additional insights are welcome, if not encouraged.  

This is the ninth in a series.

Channel Data Management

Over the years, I've come to understand the importance of effective channel data management. What I've learned is that channel data management is about transforming sales data from all my channel partners into actionable intelligence that drives business decisions.

Companies with access to timely and accurate channel sales data consistently outperform their competitors. With actionable intelligence from your channel data, you can easily review channel partner performance, identify opportunities to add new partners, and systematically grow sales. More importantly, you can begin to choose the most suitable partners for target markets - those that provide the best penetration, fastest sales cycles, and maximum value to my organization.

Successful channel data management allows you to accurately identify your strongest, most loyal partners while simultaneously spotting "at-risk" relationships before they become problems. You can segment partners by industry codes to create highly targeted campaigns, find occasional buyers and convert them to more consistent purchasers, and identify partners who could broaden their product mix.

The best places to focus your data collection efforts are on six critical areas: 

1. Recruitment: track new partner acquisition rates and compare target numbers to actual conversion rates.
2. Enablement:  monitor training completion across technical and sales categories, measuring the impact by comparing training completion to deal sizes and partner specialization.
3. Demand Generation, 4) Sales Performance, 5) Adoption, and 6) Incentives:  demand generation metrics help distinguish between business developers and account farmers, identifying which partners excel at winning "white space" deals. You can establish benchmark conversion rates and track ROI per partner on co-marketing spend, which directly informs my MDF allocation decisions. 

"Garbage in, Garbage out."

Poor channel data can create a ripple effect of adverse consequences throughout your organization. Inaccurate data leads to flawed revenue reporting, incorrect balance sheet numbers, and inadequate audit trails that can ultimately result in compliance failures.

Best practices should include collecting channel sales data in real-time from partners in their preferred format, incentivizing them to provide end-customer data, and ensuring they can track their progress in near real-time. Verify all data to improve program performance through analytics and maintain regular data cleansing routines.

By following best practices, you should be able to answer four key questions: 

1. Who are we selling to? 
2. What are our partners' selling patterns? 
3. How do we communicate results to the field? 
4. How are we performing? 

By maintaining a global partner master database, analyzing partner buying behavior, linking reseller sales data to CRM systems, and providing dashboard views of weekly partner sales, you should be able to answer these questions confidently.

Channel data management is not just a necessary administrative function; it is a strategic advantage that drives channel success.

In my next installment, I’ll wrap things up by discussing channel relationships…