Tarek Sherazee, a director at management consultancy VIA International, says: "Suppliers run channel and account strategy rather like a driver with a frosted windscreen using his rear-view mirrors, the past financial data, to decide where to go next."  He argues that what is needed is a good view of the road ahead, using binoculars, which can show obstacles and opportunities.

Past financial numbers are, of course, of vital importance!  But there are many problems with them.  For Olson at HP: "The big issue is that financial numbers are so powerful that other drivers are ignored.”

For HP, the answer was to come up with an objective way of measuring the value that each channel partner creates for the supplier.  For help, they turned to VIA.

The challenge, says Sherazee, was to "develop a system which objectively measures the drivers that will create or destroy value in the future."  This means scoring the relationship, the partner’s understanding of its customers and a host of other variables.  These value drivers are then combined with financial data to provide a vehicle with binoculars at the front and crystal clear rear mirrors.

What would such a system look like for, say, wholesale distributors?  Sherazee says: "The broad categories of value drivers might include productivity – where we would measure the fill rate, inventory management and the speed with which the distributor delivered the product, etc. 

The relationship itself would be another category.  Here we would measure the distributor’s commitment to co-market, access to decision-makers and, maybe, the strategic alignment between the distributor and the supplier.

A third category could be demand growth.  Does the distributor have end-user insight?  What services do they provide to help resellers go to market?"