Thank you for attending (or not) our webinar on channel incentives for this new economy. During the webinar, we reviewed the effects of the Great Recession on the channel and how it has impacted IT & Telecom vendor’s incentive programs. We also listened to the “voice of the partner” to better understand their challenges participating in your program – followed by a target practice lesson aimed at balancing and delivering the right incentives to the right partners at the right time. It was a lot of content for 45 minutes and we stayed high level in order to please everyone in the audience.
If you felt we stated the obvious, you’ll be pleased to learn that as we go into 2012, we’ll dive into each segment in-depth, and analyze the facts behind the most successful incentive programs hawkeye has managed in the last 15 years. The objective of this analysis is to share key drivers for success in channel incentive programs, and provide you with a better perspective on our data-driven approach to incentives for the 2012 sales cycle.
Incentive programs are prone to generating considerable amounts of waste, as channel marketing teams allocate more and more dollars to their incentives programs without a clear understanding of what really makes them successful. Waste is especially evident on rebate programs that pay partners on volume, without consideration of partner engagement. Without a data-driven approach to recognizing the behavior of successful partners, incentive programs can only be judged by tactical measurements, instead of how well they support the real goal of increasing partner performance.
A data-driven approach to incentive plan design – identifies best practices that already exist within your channel ecosystem, and then places the right incentives to inspire those same behaviors across the targeted partner tier; raising the overall standard of performance, and creating positive changes that last.
We’ll continue to bring you more insights on measuring the true incremental impact of your channel programs in 2012. We know how vital it is to identify and prioritize partners with the greatest potential and align your resources so that you can invest in programs and partners that really make a difference.
The trees are changing color here in Seattle and that means….you thought I was going to say Fall is in the air right? Well, yes, but it also means that we are all thinking about 2012 and not just those Doomsday predictions. It’s time to plan budgets and strategies for the Channel.
We talk a lot about being data driven here at hawkeye and truly believe it needs to be a part of everything we do with our customers in the Channel. For companies seeking to maximize their large investment in incentives provided to partners, access to data and the ability to analyze that data is essential. For example, one of the things we suggest to our clients is that it is not enough to just track metrics with a rebate program – a best-in-class rebate platform should be able to provide modeling to determine your financial exposure.
Next week our Chief Channel Strategist Claudio Ayub will be presenting a webinar on Channel Incentive Programs for a Sluggish Economy. Incentive programs are always of huge interest to Partners but the challenge for Vendors is to maximize the investment: who do you incentivize? Which is better – company level incentives or team/individual incentives? Claudio will look at a variety of incentives programs with advice on how to target the appropriate program to the right partners.
We’re partnering with the Baptie Community for this webinar and look forward to a lively Q&A session after Claudio’s presentation – we hope you’ll join us. Click here to register.
Next week (July 27th) is the capstone broadcast for hawkeye’s webinar series on the Data-Driven Organization. As the organizer for our webinars, I thought it would be fun to try something new this time so we’re taking questions during registration and the entire webinar is being built around submitted questions and registrants’ areas of interest. The original plan was to have two experts available to field questions. I’ve been receiving so many interesting (and diverse!) queries this week that I’ve reached out to a couple other subject matter experts and now have a panel of four SMEs for the webinar.
If you have a question you need answered this is really a great chance to get four experts focused on your issue. The panelists are Greg Osenga, Dave Hafermann, Deb Broderson, and Vaughn Aust and collectively they have a wealth of experience in the channel including analytics, ROI, data integrity, CRM/PRM, MDF, and rewards/incentives.
And, yes, I know this sounds like a shameless plug for our webinar (big blog no-no), but really, I just want to be sure I have lots of questions to keep this panel really busy for an hour! If you have a question you want to get answered, just register here or if you’ve already registered and thought of something else, feel free to drop me an email at tdelphia@hawkeyeww.com.
Last week I participated in a webinar with Dave Hafermann where we talked about CRM/PRM integration. Dave and I have worked together on several CRM/PRM projects – I focus on work with the marketing team and business processes and Dave drives the technical bits. We’ve distilled our experiences into a 4 step process shown in the diagram.
I wanted to revisit the sustain part of the diagram in this blog post. hawkeye has worked with several clients on CRM/PRM engagements and we are normally brought it somewhere around the “Design” phase. Of course, I work closely with my contacts to encourage a strongly shared channel vision and for the most part, clients are unable to secure funding for a process of this magnitude to begin the Design and Implementation stages until c-level executives have reached some meeting of the minds and agreed on a channel program vision.
But where I often see companies struggle is after the integration has taken place. It seems like we feel the hard part in this process is completing the technical implementation – deciding on a thorough roadmap with achievable goals along the way, and then achieving that vision. Really though, the biggest challenge turns out to be sustaining the solution once built. In our experiences with clients, these are the activities that matter most in sustaining your solution:
- Create ownership at every level of the organization. This was a theme in our presentation and that’s because without it, the quality and continuity of your PRM solution is going to suffer.
- Have a single owner/champion for the PRM infrastructure. Because IT has an endless list of company-wide, urgent priorities to juggle, it’s best that this be someone from the Business team. Plus, the business team is going to understand the dynamics of the channel. The ideal ownership arrangement is to have a business-side owner with a strong IT champion (on the inside) – your perfect partnership.
- Establish a PRM governance office consisting of Business and IT members. This is essentially a steering committee for your solution that reviews and prioritizes ongoing investment requests.
- Establish clear PRM process controls, UAT policy, and release cycles. Your solution will (should!) be constantly evolving and you need to ensure that everyone knows the process. This helps avoid any unrealistic expectations and should reduce friction with IT.
- Provide skills training and build it into job descriptions AND compensation plans. The reality is that for most people, PRM does not come naturally. Yup, that includes marketing people! People in the best position to add valuable information to the system to be trained on the system – Sales and Account Management are key here.
- Establish PRM success metrics and build in a means of collecting necessary data to report on performance. A good place to start is with the factors that contributed to the vision and vision goals established at the outset. Make sure this information can be collected consistently and analysed over time.
- Establish data quality metrics and owners for the metrics. You need to have formal procedures for collecting, maintaining and updating data – and these all need to comply with data privacy and opt-ins at the country level. Don’t forget processes for receiving data from other internal sources like Finance.
- Establish PRM Administration policy, access controls and security. Your CRM/PRM integration helped you reach a single source of truth – knowledge – of your channel program and data. With all this great data now available, you need to be sure that not only will everyone have the data they need to complete tasks, but there need to be clear access levels and processes to ensure data integrity and limit misuse of data. And don’t forget to factor in data privacy and compliance needs here as well.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. I can’t say it enough – you have to continue to communicate with all your constituents and stakeholders to keep your CRM/PRM solution viable.
Do you have items to add to this list based on your experiences in a CRM/PRM integration project? Alternatively I love to hear your experiences – how did you and your organization manage (or not) to keep things going after implementation? Let me know!
