Managing Complex Channels

Over 40 senior managers gathered at sponsor Oracle's sparkling Reading office for a series of three workshops on Managing Complex Channels. The afternoon was a chance to really get to grips with the issues, as well as to network with peers in other companies and other industries.

The afternoon generated a lot of heat and a fair amount of light! Adam Dorrell at Avaya described it as: "one of the best events I have attended. It is good to see that others are wrestling with the same issues that we face."

The first session on Influencing the influencers we cover in more detail in our feature on page 5. The next two sessions covered How to Align Sell-with and Sell-through channels and Making functional compensation work.

How to align sell with and sell through

What emerged clearly from the session was the very different ways of motivating sell-through partners, such as resellers, and sell-with partners, such as influencers.

Ann Pennell at SGI says: "In sell-through you need very clear rules of engagement. You need clear communications and predictability."

Many suppliers aired their unease about sell-through channels. One participant said: "The problem with sell-through is you have no control over what sort of experience the end-user will really have with your brand. With sell-with we feel that we do have some control."

Another headache of sell-through was raised by another participant: "Resellers just wonÕt give us any sort of transparency on deals. We have very little idea what products people are going to buy or when."

Other delegates agreed that these were big issues. One said: "All you can really hope to do is to ensure that your sell-through partners are making enough margin from you."

Leads referral to sell-through partners was another problem area. One delegate complained that he simply had no idea whether leads were actually being followed up. Another replied that, in their experience, resellers placed little or no value on leads, as they knew that many leads were simply not qualified properly.

The inevitable conclusion was that leads had to be qualified in some way, before they were dispatched to partners. RTMA director general Max Hotopf pointed out that, in any case, unless leads were qualified, you could not establish whether they had been worth purchasing through marketing. He suggested that, perhaps, one answer was to engage in different types of joint marketing with partners, such as seminar programmes and move away from leads referral as the focus.

Pennell reckons that suppliers need to have mechanisms in place to ensure some discipline: "If partners don't use their value-add to sell our products, then we have it written into the contract that we can remove their rebates, and so effectively stop the sale. We use this extremely rarely, but we do stipulate, for example, that our hardware has to be sold as part of a bigger solution. It is written into their contracts that they can only sell into certain industries."

Workshop members also looked at how to avoid conflict with direct. Ann Pennell at SGI said: "we have a scheme whereby the direct salesperson only gets rewarded for selling specific items. This encourages them to use indirect partners as much as possible."