Making C-Webs Work
Why should you be investing in the technology for business channels at all? Because the essence of channels is to match the right people and resources to the right jobs, at the lowest cost. Plus, no company can afford to serve every market in the world directly. The world's largest and most successful companies don't try to do that. General Electric uses channels, GM uses channels, Microsoft, overwhelmingly, uses channels.

Does Exxon sell only through Exxon-owned outlets? No, they sell through thousands of independently owned and operated channel partners. In the IT industry, Value Added Resellers are still vital to hardware and software firms.

Channels were supposed to be obsolete with the Internet, remember. We were all going to be Amazon, selling direct, goodbye partners, the Web's the only channel we need. Well, companies woke up and realized they'd been doing profitable business with channel partners for generations. So they decided not to get rid of their partners, but to use the Internet to support their partners. They started investing in those relationships, not bypassing them. Today, smart enterprises use the Internet to push information to partners, instead of trying to reach around the partner to grab that customer for themselves.

Easy Does It
A PRM study Front Line Solutions conducted over the past 18 months bears this out. South African financial services firm Liberty Group reported that "we select our partners based on the relationships they have with customers," meaning that channels were the main strategy to access the target market. Other companies saw partners as a critical sales channel, commenting that the key to success is to get the channel to support the company and recommend their solution to prospects." A typical comment was along the lines of "we want to be the easiest company to do business with."

That last sentence is a key to successful partner and customer collaborations. If you want to do more business with partners, sometimes it's a matter of making it easier for them to sell your products. This means giving them up-to-date product specs and collaterals, especially for high-tech products. Alert your partners when you change something à it sounds like a small thing, and it is, but it's critical. It doesn't have anything to do with up-selling or cross-selling to partners, it's about just making it easier for them to understand and sell your products.

The best partner collaboration systems, almost anyone will tell you, by definition are the easiest ones to use. Quite simply, the easier the system is to use, the more hits there will be. Easier to use means easier to do business with.

Don't be afraid to actually approach partners and users. "We called both large and small dealers and asked, if we built a comprehensive, information-rich Web site, how much time would it save per week, especially on the sales side," says Executone's channel marketing manager Paul Lavallee. "We also assessed the impact on specific departments within Executone."

One other thing: Don't compete with your partners. The biggest business mistake is competing with business partners. Either leverage or kill your business channels. If you waffle in the middle, you can get killed. If you think you need lots of local service, then you can leverage your local relationships. If you don't, it might be best to kill them off. Companies who try to have their cake and eat it too, unfortunately, usually end up by hacking everyone off. Think of Dell Computers, who in a gutsy move gave up their account with Staples, at a time when it was a multimillion-dollar profit maker. They did it because they decided their best course was to focus on their business model.