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Channel Manager Brief
Channel Manager Brief
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Table of Contents
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Your Partners Want More
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Rookie to Rock Star: Accelerating the Development of Channel Partnerships, Amazon Consulting, 2010
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Partner Development Managers are more proactive and more focused in their
recruitment efforts. They've got the intuition and the skills to engineer the
best match between the needs of the vendor and the solution provider.
It's a leadership position that will encourage successful long-term
relationships even in the face of tough economic times and shifting channel
business models. Which is why we think that if you can have only one role in
your channel enablement team, it needs to be the Partner Development
Manager.
John Scola
VP, Partner Recruitment & Excellence
Amazon Consulting
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L
Increasing demands from partners has spurred some vendors to respond to those needs
e with dedicated recruitment and enablement managers. For example, software giant SAP
has both Channel Recruitment Managers and is piloting a new role of Channel Incubator
a Manager in North America. The Incubator role works only with new designated partners
to them for nurturing by the Channel Recruit Manager. The Channel Incubators
dpassed
sole role is to work with the partner on hands-on sales and onboarding tactical activities
12-18 months, with the overall goal to make the partner successful in driving
Efor
revenue and to become self-sufficient.
In the first stage, the partner development manager helps the company grow
its partner ecosystem. Their job is to find the right partners, to match
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company goals with partner needs, to explore and define the benefits of
working together. Its more critical today than ever before for an
entrepreneurial-minded business executive to understand, own and sell the
value the company brings to the prospective partner and how they might
benefit from investing time and resources to become a productive and selfsufficient partner. Vendors need to actively recruit a new breed of Partner
Development Manager who is a savvy hunter, who understands business
and technology, and who is an entrepreneurial team leader.
Moving the partner from initial engagement and recruitment to becoming
activated at the sales, technical and marketing levels is a proverbial cliff many
Channel Sales Managers fall off of as they try to move partners along their
development path. At this activate stage, the Partner Development
Manager takes the basic program elements to a higher level. This is where
the partner gets introduced to their functional partner team members (the
safety net) to establish ongoing support relationships and to accelerate the
activation of their partnership.
Phase
Engage
Activate
(Onboard)
Activate
(Enable)
Program enrollment
Contract negotiations and administration
Manage
Program enrollment
Contract administration
Initiate on-boarding process
marketing resources
Ramp
management
Revenue monitoring
Renewing contracts
Pre-Sales training
Synch with Partner Marketing Manager to offer guidance and
support for campaigns
Linkage with field account managers for mentoring
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and evolution of the relationship. This handoff point varies from partner to
partner depending on the complexity and depth of the partnership.
In stage two, the Partner Development Manager becomes a coach, teacher,
and facilitator. They show the new partner the path to productivity. They lead
the partner management team which provides sales, marketing, technical and
operational support the partner needs to ramp steadily and achieve ROI
faster, all while keeping functional overlaps and operational complexity to a
minimum for the partner.
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Microsoft has long used the field Technical Solution Specialist (TSS) to enable and
support their solution providers in the field. Technical Solutions Specialists provide
partner assistance to navigate the resources, sales and marketing support from the
Microsoft product solution teams for their respective specialization. TSS staff engage on
specific customer deals and support partners during the sales process while helping to
move the partners technical staff to self-sufficiency. Microsoft uses its Channel
Recruitment Manager to help the partner proactively build its pipeline. The Channel
Recruitment Manager aligns the partner with the TSS and the direct sales people to help
drive their first 5-7 customer opportunities.
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Regardless of their size or channel maturity, vendors are typically not able to
fund enough dedicated channel resources to adequately assist all partner
types and tiers. Channel Managers teamed with Technical Solution Specialists
can usually support and manage 30 to 40 enabled partners in an assigned
region/geography. Technical and Marketing Enablement Managers, since they
are assisting most frequently with purely the training and enabling of new
partners, can support many partners and multiple Channel Sales Managers,
and Partner Development Managers.
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The challenge lies in determining how many partner prospects and new
recruits a Partner Development Manager can manage. Solution providers will
be at various stages along the development continuum so there is never a
dull moment. When partners pass their first successful year they may
transition to a Channel Sales Managers responsibility, while the Partner
Development Manager will continue to find and nurture new partners to
address new markets or technologies. On average, we see vendors with an
established Partner Development Manager role manage about 8-12 partners
in the on-boarding process at any one time.
Vendor
Role
Distribution
Inside
Manager
Channel Sales
Manager
Partner Development
Manager
Vendor Role
Distribution
Inside
Manager
Partner Development
Manager
Primary
Recruitment
Focus
Inbound recruit
calls
Researches, identifies,
qualifies and recruits
Partner Touch
Points
Low-volume,
unmanaged
VARs
Silver and
bronze volume
VARs
# of VARs
Managed
>100
>100
50-60
15-20
Enablement
Duties
Owns
enablement and
management
directly
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The ultimate measure of any new role is how its success is measured by the
vendor and the partner. In order to attract and retain the right talent for the
new Partner Development Manager role, it is imperative to provide a new
compensation plan that recognizes and rewards the efforts to hunt for new
partners and the ultimate outcome of those efforts increased revenue.
Compensation should be tied to the metrics of the value-based partner
program including tracking rewarding for recruiting, on-boarding,
enablement, certifications, industry wins and high customer satisfaction.
Case Study: HP
Channel-centric giant Hewlett Packard organizes its SMB partner coverage like its
direct account coverage model. HP puts the partner in the generalist role for most
accounts and supports them with HP specialists. In 2011, the Personal Systems Group
(PSG) followed suit for the role of those building and nurturing the channel, as follows:
Partner Sales Reps (PSR) - Outside field sales resources that engage actively in
partner team-selling, face-to-face with end users. PSRs are compensated on a
geographical territory sales quota, not based on the performance of individual
partners.
Partner Development Reps (PDR) - Inside sales resources responsible for partner
coverage, recruiting and development. Their role is to help farm solution
providers who are already enabled to ramp their revenue. PDRs are compensated
for the growth of individual partners year over year.
How will these value-based metrics affect compensation? The old adage
applies - people do what you pay them to do.
We really saw increased performance in the Channel Recruiter role once we
started measuring the metric of time-to-revenue vs. quantity of new
partners," says John Scola, vice president of partner recruitment and
excellence for SAP. "Channel Recruiters have also been more effective than
CSMs in partner selection resulting in bringing on higher quality partners.
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In order to attract the sales skills, experience, and track record required of a
Partner Development Manager, vendors will find that they should be paying
higher base salaries since there is less opportunity for commission. One
solution is to set up annual and quarterly objectives around the steps in the
partner development cycle. Keep in mind, the partner is investing their first
12-18 months and so is the vendor by providing the right resource for the
job.
Although SAP, Microsoft, HP and Sophos are all instituting new compensation
plans and measurement criteria for new roles like the Partner Development
Manager, it is still appropriate for them and other IT vendors to continue to
compensate the traditional Channel Sales Manager on the fundamental
metrics of revenue and enablement activities.
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Amazon Recommends
When partners don't feel well supported by their vendors, don't see signs of
early returns on their relationship investments or don't achieve measurable
milestones, vendor loyalty goes out the window. In this challenging and
dynamic environment, vendors need to keep partners' perceived value on the
top of the priority list throughout the recruitment lifecycle. Amazon believes
that the Partner Development Manager plays a crucial part in keeping
priorities straight.
This burgeoning role will help vendors better ramp new partners during the
critical first 12 to 18 months and help partners navigate the relationship going
forward. Upfront vendor investment with the right combination of resources
and benefits, along with patience and dedication (yes those are still virtues)
will drive measurable success for a new partnership.
We see five partner management imperatives that every technology
vendor should consider:
1.
2.
3.
Establish clear role definitions with measureable metrics for each stage
of the partner development cycle be willing to create a new
compensation plan to reward those development metrics.
4.
5.
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Key Contributor:
Susan Pessemier - Consultant
Susan brings many years in channel sales leadership roles with technology companies
to this topic. Having been on both sides of the fence as the vendor channel sales
leader for Microsoft, Exodus, Savvis and QlikTech to owning her own IT reseller
practice for 9 years. Susan is passionate about the need to evolve the vendor partner
facing roles to better serve the ever-expanding partner community.
Established in 1997, Amazon Consulting, LLC, (Mountain View, CA) increases the impact of
partnering by designing, implementing and automating effective partner models. Amazon
Consultings clients entrust them to formulate growth strategies, build route-to-market models,
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and provide temporary experts for project management and program execution. Drawing on
decades of combined experience, Amazon Consulting makes available a vast library of partnering
resources, hosts regular informational webcasts, and offers PartnerG2, a comprehensive partner
intelligence subscription service. For clients looking to optimize the partner relationships and
improve organizational efficiencies, Amazon Consulting also offers a hosted partner automation
system called PartnerPath. For more information please visit www.amazonconsulting.com.
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