Your Deal Registration Process is Costing You Revenue
Deal registration should accomplish something very simple: Protect the partner and establish ownership of the opportunity. Yet somewhere along the way, many companies turned it into an administrative process. Multiple required fields. Customer details the partner may not have yet. Internal approvals. Qualification questions. Follow-up emails. All before the partner knows whether you’ll even protect […]
Your Compensation Plan is Fighting Your Channel
You can tell partners they’re important. You can recruit them, enable them, and invest in the relationship. But if your internal compensation structure puts your salespeople in competition with those partners, eventually the compensation plan will win. This is especially common in companies adding a channel motion to an existing direct sales organization. A partner […]
More Partners Doesn’t Mean More Revenue
One of the most common mistakes I see is confusing partner recruitment with partner success. Recruiting partners feels like progress. Your ecosystem grows. Your partner count increases. Everyone celebrates the latest logo added to the website. But partner recruitment is only the beginning. Every new partner requires an investment of time; from channel managers, sales […]
You’re Recruiting Partners Too Early
One of the most expensive mistakes startups make is believing the channel will validate a product the market hasn’t yet. It won’t. Partners aren’t product testers. They’re trusted advisors protecting relationships they’ve spent years building. Before asking partners to invest their credibility, ask yourself: If those answers aren’t clear, adding partners won’t solve the problem. […]
Why Most Startup Channel Programs Never Scale
I’ve spent more than two decades working with technology advisors, distributors, master agents, suppliers, and channel leaders. One pattern shows up over and over again. Startups build a channel program…but operate it like a direct sales organization. That’s the first mistake. Partners are not an outsourced sales force waiting to memorize your product. They’re trusted […]