Good is the Enemy of a Great Channel!

We've all heard the saying, "good is the enemy of great!" The saying highlights a mindset of settling for "just good enough". The problem is, settling for good actually stops us from achieving great. We never truly reach our full potential. The "good enough" mindset accepts substandard results! "Good enough" keeps championship caliber teams and athletes from winning it all. The "good enough" mindset keeps businesses from innovating (Blockbuster, Kodak, Xerox). Superstar athletes like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady, coaches like John Wooden and Mike Krzyzewski were acutely aware of this principle setting personal and organizational standards that drove their teams to greatness.

The "good is the enemy of great" principle applies to channel sales! We all accept an opportunistic, best effort, demand creation process as the standard for the modern channel model. We all run the same partner sales creation process:

1) Recruit and onboard new partners.

2) Complete sales and technical certification enablement (program compliance).

3) Build a joint GTM business plan with your partners and map accounts.

4) Follow up in a month and hope the partner is executing, delivering results.

The channel runs this partner sales creation model over and over to create new demand, and it works! The problem is the model works "just good enough". It's the reason no one tries to change it. However, the model isn't "great!" There's a better way to run channels that unlocks the true potential of the partner ecosystem to generate new demand and consistently grow revenues. With today's economic environment, it's time for companies to rethink their approach to partner led sales creation and raise the standard from "good enough" to "great". So, how can you make your channel model great? Here are four principles designed to help you consistently achieve 20% plus channel revenue growth!

4 Channel Principles to Achieve "Greatness!"

For the channel to achieve its full potential, there are four principles every channel professional should incorporate in their partner sales creation process.

1) Shift the Focus of Your Channel Model to Creating Active Sellers Every channel pro has been trained to think in terms of Partner Programs, Partnerships, Products and Pricing (The 4 P's of channel). While there is nothing wrong with this approach, it's "good enough!" The real power of the channel is the Partner Seller. So what if we shifted our channel model to prioritize developing, resourcing, and measuring active partner sellers. An active partner seller is defined as a partner associate or engineer that's proactively executing your sales play, prospecting for new opportunities with your target accounts. The shift to creating and managing active sellers fundamentally changes the focus of channel and how we manage the channel. Organizing educating, resourcing, and measuring the progress of partner sellers creates tremendous prospecting power in the market to generate revenues faster.

2) Shift from Product/Sales Enablement to Strategy Enablement The channel focuses heavily on product enablement training partners using solution overviews, use cases and value propositions. While there is nothing wrong with this approach and its "good enough", not "great". The problem with this common approach is we don't enable a strategy, providing partners with a recipe to Identify, Reach, Influence, Develop and Expand new sales. Shifting from product enablement to developing and enabling Sales Plays teaches partners best practices for how to sell your solution. It creates a repeatable and scalable model that transitions passive partners to active sellers. Strategy Enablement transforms your relevance and mindshare with your partner sellers, moving your solution up their priority stack making it easy for sellers to lead with your solution. Shifting to strategy enablement will make your enablement "great"!

3) Adopt a Structured Coverage Model The average channel recruits partners by geography and positions basic account mapping and geography to define coverage. This is approach is often "good enough" and can produce results. The problem is traditional account mapping is never associated with a master list, with each account vetted and scored against your solution's Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and scored against your Partner's Relationship Strength (PRS) within the account. Incorporating structured coverage, assigning coverage based on data and positioning sales plays to create top of funnel dramatically improves the sales performance of the partner. Adopting a structured coverage model transitions, your partner's prospecting activity from "good enough" to "great"!

4) Capture Partner Seller Strategy Execution Metrics Channel Leaderships has always been data-driven. We focus on POS, program compliance, certifications, CSAT, deal registrations and forecast data to measure the health of our partner ecosystem. Collecting partner level data is "good enough", but not "great!" The problem is this data is not really actionable when it comes to the most important element of partnerships, "creating new demand". The data we collect is circumstantial evidence of a healthy partnership, but we never have visibility to what the individual partner seller is doing to create demand for our solutions by account. Capturing strategy execution metrics provides actionable channel management data providing a true health of our channel in near real-time. This shift allows us to attribute the value of the partner to create and develop new sales. We can now shift from opportunistic, best effort channel sales to structured demand creation taking our channel management from "good enough" to "great!"

Summary: Most of us reading this post are really good at our jobs. We are masters of our process and partner relationships. We hit our numbers or come close. We all make a comfortable living. The challenge is moving from our comfort zones and changing our standards to strive to be great. Today's channel models are good enough, but they can be great. If you are not generating 20% plus revenue growth, now is the time to explore new approaches to channel sales creation. Channel Force Inc helps companies transition from opportunistic, best effort channel sales models to a data-driven, structured performance model (Partnerships 3.0). We have a channel sales management tool (TAPapp) that captures active seller strategy execution activities providing complete visibility to the partner led demand creation process making channel management easy. If you would like more information about how our next generation Partnerships 3.0 Model will transform the revenue performance of your channel or you would like to run a predictive analysis of your revenue results, please reach out to me at Expert@CsaaSCorp.com Let's not settle for "good enough in 2023!"