Vendor and Channel Alignment Rates an F

Yep. It's true. It's in the new Channel Performance Outlook 2008 report from the Channel Performance Board [a subgroup of CMO Council]. There's a serious disconnect between vendors, their channel partners and the vendors' efforts to optimize customer engagement.

"Given that sales channels roughly account for a 70 percent of the revenues of many industries, the bottom line is that the most critical avenues of customer engagement and purchasing are dysfunctional. Their overall performance grade: F."

But, let's not wallow. Let's see where things went wrong and take a look at what to do about them.

It appears that the report is saying that vendors are keeping the cream of the lead crop for themselves and passing the dregs to their channel partners. And with as much as 80% of business leads languishing or ineffectively handled, this is a huge opportunity for top-line growth.

Training and support need to be expanded to keep channel partners up to speed with new products and programs.

Only 18% of partners said they partner frequently with vendors. Being that customers see partners as an extension of the vendor's company, this could be a huge contributing factor to customer confusion and discontent.

With only 30% of partners rating vendor marketing programs as effective, it's time for vendors to ask their partners for input. Considering that partners are in the field with customers, company's are losing out on critical insights that could increase alignment and customer engagement from consistent and meaningful marketing programs.

Less than 22% of partners say they have exclusivity on opportunities. Competing with your own partners for customers is not an efficient use of resources...is it? Because of this competitive environment, 39% of partners are hiding fresh lead information from vendors. This is a huge loss of intelligence and insight to who's interested in buying from your company.

The upshot is that 67% of partners say they're focusing on customer acquisition. And they're going to do it with or without vendors, creating their own marketing programs and initiatives. It makes me wonder what that will do to a vendor's brand - if 50 partners all come up with versions of marketing programs on their own, what's the likelihood that they'll be in sync with the brand the vendor has spent considerable resources building?

There's lots of other good stuff in this report, so go get a copy.

Oh, and go sign up for the CLOSE event up at Stanford University on May 12th. I'm going to be there and I invite you to get in on this conversation that's so important - how to drive sales effectiveness by bringing marketing and sales closer together. It's bound to be a full day of exciting ideas and brainstorming about next steps and best practices. You can get a discounted price from my link on this post.

Comments

[Kendra Lee]

We find that vendors often keep the best leads to themselves either because they don’t feel their channel partners have the consultative selling skills to appropriately represent the vendor, or the vendor doesn’t have customer satisfaction data that demonstrates the channel partners’ implementation expertise. The consultative selling skills can be solved through training and product information. The customer sat data can be solved by having channel partners share testimonials and end-client results