This is where you find that channel and marketing departments have been set up to meet past needs.

Markets, channels and products have all now changed, leaving the existing capability looking expensive and vulnerable.  National subsidiaries may be hugely overweight in branding and marketing.  Agency relationships may be fragmented. Funding may be locked into old entitlements.  Nothing is "joined up."

There may also be a strategic vacuum.  Typically, those in the field will tell us that there is no existing channel strategy.  Often there is one, but it has simply not been communicated properly.  Where a clear sense of strategy is lacking, marketing units become short-term and tactical.  Marketing development funds are spent because they are there.

A good indicator of tactical behaviour is when the functions of allied departments – marcoms, channels, product development – all start to converge, leading to duplication and inefficiency.  Andrew Tallian, head of our partner consultancy MarketFrames, and formerly VP marketing worldwide at Hewlett-Packard’s consumer division, describes this behaviour as rather like children playing soccer all going for the ball.

Once a strategy has been put in place that is understood by all, these departments can start moving into their proper positions and play their allocated roles.

The challenge is to renovate the entire go-to-market function whilst continuing to run the business.  It takes a thorough analysis of the business strategy to get go-to-market capabilities right.  These can include being able to drive forward new category positions, to generate future products or solutions, to manage customer relationships and to manage market programmes to deliver strong market and customer positions.

These capabilities need to be joined up with each other and with the rest of the business. Establishing the processes that do this is a major part of the job.

Often the real problems are internal.  Our confidential survey of the beefs and goals of a dozen channel managers highlights just how bad some of these can be (see page 3).

Nobody is prepared to voice them internally.  Far better to keep your head down and concentrate on day-to-day activities.

Changing behaviour, even in well-managed companies, is always difficult.  As our page 8 article "Building partner-centric account management" shows, these projects take years, not months.  A consensus has to be built up and senior managers have to buy in to the project before training and systems can be implemented with any success. 

We want to help address these concerns because they are often the very reasons that strategies fail.  Hence our problem page (facing). The RTMA web site will be launching forums for the discussion of issues such as how decision-making responsibilities should be deployed and how accountability-for-performance measures should be shared.