Our signature Channel Program Blueprint (CPB) report provides a framework for understanding the primary elements associated with a successful sales channel, and helps you establish a plan that incorporates the people, processes, and systems to achieve results.
2. Your priorities should be focused on the
near-term business objectives of your
channel program. However, without a long-
term plan, resources are either wasted or
sub-optimized on well-intended initiatives
that fall short of business goals.
Our signature Channel Program Blueprint
(CPB) report provides a framework for
understanding the primary elements
associated with a successful sales channel,
and helps you establish a plan that
incorporates the people, processes, and
systems to achieve results.
2
INTRODUCTION
3. 3
The Channel Program Blueprint includes four sections:
1. Channel Program Assessment and Priorities
2. People, Plans, and Alignment
3. Current Systems and Ease of Doing Business
4. Potential Timeline and Next Steps
4. 4
There are five key elements for a successful
sales channel:
1. Business Planning. A solid planning framework guides all
the decisions that should be made for enabling and
supporting a sales channel and offers a way to
communicate the roles and responsibilities in the sales
hierarchy. A comprehensive analysis spans all levels from
the vendors’ goals and objectives, through the partners’
goals and objectives, straight to the tactics and best
practices required at the customer point of sale.
2. Partner Recruitment. Finding the right partners and
getting them productive as quickly as possible is critical.
The tasks that need to be addressed during this phase
include:
• Developing an ideal partner profile and an associated
assessment tool to prioritize your partner applicants/
• Developing a marketing campaign to attract potential
partners to your organization.
• Developing a workflow to support the application,
selection, documentation, contracting, and reporting
process involved in recruiting and onboarding partners—
in a scalable way.
5. 5
3. Partner Enablement. Recruited partners need to be
properly certified so that they can effectively represent
your brand as a partner. The enabling process usually
entails:
• Developing sales/service support, sales aids,
collateral, and other tools needed for partner
success.
• Creating co-branded marketing materials.
• Establishing an appropriate incentive program to
guide desired behaviors and results.
• Providing accessibility to subject matter experts as
needed to assist in sales efforts.
• Providing sales playbooks that are based on ever-
changing best practices across the channel.
• Providing tools for partner managers throughout the
organizational hierarchy of the channel.
• Establishing quality and efficient training and
certification programs and processes.
6. 6
4. Demand Creation. In today’s buyer-driven marketing and selling environment, the following best practices are
critical to developing an efficient demand creation engine:
• Establishing a bi-directional lead management and associated deal registration process that supports tracking leads
that originate at the manufacturer/vendor level and conversely, deals that originate at the partner level.
• Establishing roles and responsibilities for integrated marketing at the manufacturer/vendor level and at the partner
level.
5. Technology Strategy: Measuring, Monitoring, and Reporting. The ability to measure and monitor performance
is essential to managing sales channels. Key best practices in this regard include:
• Developing a technology strategy that allows for the integration of external solutions into one seamless, easy-to-
use system.
• Identification and selection of the sub-systems that are needed to support the previous four components of the CPB
above.
• Designing and configuring management reports and dashboards that can be pushed down to the management
levels throughout the channel, including those that channel partners can use to run their businesses locally.
• Establishment of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that the entire channel will use to communicate goals and
monitor performance against those goals.
7. 7
Our final deliverable helps organizations
provide a simple framework to “get everyone
on the same page” when it comes to a
channel strategy. It provides a basis for
setting priorities for resource allocation and
the application of best practices from similar
companies, third-party research, and
LogicBay’s own experiences to achieve
sustainable channel performance
improvement.
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BENEFITS OF THE CPB PROCESS