(Newswire.net — July 23, 2020) –A recent research report on channel sales and partner strategy from collaborative data platform provider Crossbeam confirms the positive impact of channel partners on a company’s profitability. While the report identified how channel partners have a demonstrable impact on a vendors’ revenues, it also highlighted that companies also could do more to support their channel sales programs.
The research indicated that 90% of respondents confirmed that channel sales partnerships had led to increased revenues for their companies. It also outlines how channel partnerships have had a significant impact on market development, customer retention and improved marketing results.
However, the report also suggests that the challenges of making a strong financial case for the return on investment in channel programs is presenting substantial obstacles to securing further investment in these channel sales initiatives. Much of the problem seems to stem from poor management of channel data, especially when it comes to attributable sales. Many companies still track “partner influenced” sales manually which leads to considerable leakage from the ROI numbers. The companies that have been able to automate these partner-influenced sales are able to demonstrate higher ROI, which in turn leads to greater investment in channel sales initiatives.
An obvious implication of the research is that channel leaders who want to build a strong business case for further investment in their channel sales training programs and channel partner initiatives need to have a much firmer grip on their channel sales data. In order to achieve this they will need to invest in the appropriate channel platforms to collect, clean, process, and analyze channel sales data submitted by their channel partners.
Achieving a clear, robust and holistic view of channel sales data (both directly from partner sales reports but also partner-attributable sales) will provide a wide array of benefits. Channel sales and marketing activities between vendors and partners will become more aligned, new opportunity identification will be improved, joint lead progression will become more effective and ultimately sales conversions will increase leading to a higher provable ROI.
Crossbeam’s research noted that 78.6% of respondents said that getting additional resources for their channel program is a challenge.The first step would appear to be putting the right infrastructure in place to capture all channel-related sales data. The next step is to put this data to work and build a business case for further investment by proving the return on investment of previous channel spendand channel sales training courses.
Another price of research conducted by EY and Nimbus Ninety delivered similar conclusions. Although 81% of their respondents agreed that channel sales data analytics should be at the heart of all their business activities, only 23% have executed a company-wide strategy. This clearly shows that even when anecdotal evidence convinces management of the potential of investing further in channel sales, only hard data will convince them to make the requisite investment.
Channel leaders need to arm themselves with the right channel sales data platforms to help them build solid data-based business cases if they are to secure further investment in their channel sales programs.