Retail Channel Management

I‘ve spent many years in the Channel Redesigned Channel Programs for IBM, Lucent & Avaya. Moved partners from transaction to profit by selling ‘solutions.’Today, with the same goal, we’re building ‘productized service portfolios.’   Since 2005, we‘ve expanded our client list: Amelia, CloudCoCo Plc, Deutsche Telekom, Ingram Micro, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions, NTT, O2 (Telefónica UK), Oracle, Xerox...   In 2024, we’re expanding our programs: EMEA Copilot Readiness, WW Onboarding Acceleration, Sales Journey Assessments (Secret Shopping), Portfolio Management/Packaged Offer Development, Telco Maximize GTM Workshops, CloudAscent Acceleration...   While looking at 2024, I started to think..   What to do - if I was a Channel Director today?   1. Customer Insight Know to whom, what, where & why my partners are selling. Use these insights to monitor maturity & therefore investments. Add critical updates to Partner Program & cleanup DBs for unmanaged partners. Drive Customer Insight Milestone Attainment for coop access 2. Skilling & Resourcing Most IT companies have skill & resource gaps, particularly at presales & deployment. Add value with GTM Business & technical training. Improve knowledge of & success in Marketplaces. Where it makes sense, make #P2P plays 3. White Space Want partners to sell more? Show them the business case. Analyse their portfolios-capabilities & ambitions. Identify opportunities for growth: upsell, packetized services, bundles, co-sell, skilling, IP… manage improvements through a Development Plan 4. Walk Don’t Talk Customer Experience. Jay McBain said it best while at Forrester: ‘There‘s a clear correlation between superior customer experience & revenue growth.‘ Understand what it‘s like to buy hardware, software & services from partners & help them improve where they can offer better CX. What experience do we want to offer? Is it helping to close - not abandon - the buying process? What is the Benchmark & the Improvement Plan for corrections 5. GTM Advisory Create a Business Academy for learning through best practice key product-sales & marketing motions for growth   6. Create Offer Development Guidance for Compliancy Regulations Many companies will face new compliancy regulations: CSF, CIP, or for any company selling into the EU – NIS2. These are continuous multifaceted compliancy regulations with expensive risk for noncompliance. Ensuring the People-Process-Legal & Technical compliancy for customers is a big value add for CEOs if done correctly – & a significant potential loss of reputation, revenue & maybe even the customer themselves if done incorrectly. I’d put in the planning time to do this right & provide the guidance.   7.  Leads Now that we know where we’re targeting, what we’re selling & are sure we can close, find clever ways to fill the pipeline – eg. using propensity data against customer lists with tools such as Microsoft CloudAscent & others What would You do if You were a Channel Director today? #channel

Our main job as partnership professionals is to identify, understand, enable, and expand SAM (serviceable available) and SOM (service obtainable) opportunities inside our firms. While every CEO and board member can tell you the vast multi-billion dollar TAM they are chasing, very few have a realistic view of the market that their products actually compete in, and then further narrowing the view by buyer type/role, industry, segment, geo, route to market, and partner influence. In the decade of the ecosystem, market sizing is no longer a static spreadsheet exercise; it is a dynamic assessment of your direct and indirect reach. Vendors (and partners) must stop viewing TAM, SAM, and SOM through the narrow lens of direct sales capacity: --> TAM (Total Addressable Market): This is the global demand for your company. It is the theoretical ceiling of all product offerings added together, often inflated by ambition and embellishment. --> SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market): This is the portion of the TAM that fits your current product-market match. It is gated by geographic reach, product sub-category, and specific subindustry vertical. --> SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market): This is the reality check. It is what you can actually capture within the next 12–24 months based on your business capabilities and capacity today. SOM is where competition, internal resources, sales capacity, brand awareness, quantity and quality of integrations, alliances, as well as channel and services partnerships play a huge (and often sobering) role. Omdia reports 66.7% of the technology industry flowing through partners, and 96% of deals highly influenced by an average of 6.3 partners. ** Your SOM is effectively capped by the size and maturity of your channel. ** Over the past 50 years, the tech industry is notorious for the "best product" not end up winning the market. Nor does the best price or promotion. Place, or today known as platforms or partnerships, is what differentiates winners from losers. Partners no longer just provide the "last mile" of transaction. They own the majority (or all) of the 28 moments before the sale and rely on trust, specialized integration, and local expertise that a centralized sales team cannot replicate. It doesn't end there. A big portion of SAM and SOM is expansion of current clients (or wallet share gain). In an industry that is now 2/3 subscription and consumption based, partners are also surrounding the customer on every renewal forever. Upsell, cross-sell, and enrichment is also through the partner channel (not just a great internal CS/CX team). If you aren't co-selling with hyperscalers, aligning with regional and global SIs, managing long term with MSPs, integrating/stacking with ISVs, understanding the SAM of resellers/distribution, or incentivizing the long-tail of influencers, your SOM will remain a fraction of its potential. In modern tech, you don't "own" a market; you orchestrate an ecosystem to capture it.

When I started in the 1990s, a handful of vendors dominated enterprise IT: IBM, HP, SAP, Cisco controlled everything. Partner managers were essentially administrators: processing deal registrations, policing discounts and managing certifications. The real action was in direct sales. Enterprise reps were kings. Partner managers were second-class citizens. Then the landscape fragmented. The 2000–2010 era saw a proliferation of tech vendors. Best of breed replaced vertical stacks; customers needed trusted advisors like Accenture, Deloitte or regional SIs to stitch together multi-vendor solutions. A partner’s recommendation suddenly carried more weight than the direct sales rep. The balance of power shifted from vendor to channel. And with it, the partner manager’s role was forced to grow up. The best acted like mini GMs - senior individuals building mindshare at the highest levels of their partners’ organisations. They understood their partners’ business models, were adept at influencing without authority, and had sharp political instincts, knowing who was friendly, who was indifferent, and who was quietly favouring a competitor. Now comes AI - and it accelerates everything. AI is compressing the time to build competing solutions, intensifying vendor proliferation further. Routes to market have expanded beyond distributors and VARs to hyperscalers, MSPs, affiliates and referral networks. The ecosystem has never been more complex. Today’s partner manager operates as an ecosystem architect, bridging their own sales organisations with the partner ecosystem of ISVs, hyperscalers, SIs and end customers simultaneously. As AI disrupts their partners’ business models, the best are also helping partners navigate that transformation. Here is my central thesis: you get the best sales results when partnering is an integrated part of your sales motion. The best sales people know how to leverage partnerships. They toggle fluidly between customer-facing and partner-facing motions. The highest-performing companies have already figured this out: their partner functions operate at genuine parity with direct sales. Too many companies still haven’t. They will either come around or fall further behind. Having spent three decades across APAC’s technology ecosystem, I’ve watched this evolution firsthand. The role I do today bears almost no resemblance to what it was when I started. The most interesting chapter is still ahead. To the partner and alliances community: are you getting the seat at the table you’ve earned? Or is the second-class citizen culture still alive in your organisation. Greg Eckstein Moheb Moses Erika Hoffmann Xavier Sentuc Adam Bukkosy Sunil Kedaraji Eric Gaines Gene Ng

For 20+ years, I’ve lived in the gray area of “channel conflict.” Direct vs Indirect. Dealer vs Rep. National vs Regional. If you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve felt it. Territory tension. Comp overlap. The “who owns this account?” dance. Here’s what I’ve learned: Channel conflict never fully disappears. But it can be engineered. This week at our National Sales Meeting, I used a Formula 1 analogy that felt fitting. Championship teams race two cars. Are they technically competing with each other on track? Yes. Are they racing for the same constructor’s championship? Also yes. Sometimes one car fights for the title. Sometimes the other plays defense. Sometimes one blocks. Sometimes one creates space. But they always race for the same team. At STARC, Direct is our title contender. Indirect? I’m good being your Checo to your Verstappen. The Cal to your Ricky Bobby. Why? Because championship teams don’t win with one car. They win with strategy. They win with positioning. They win with alignment. After two decades of managing channel friction, I now get the opportunity to shape indirect from the ground up — intentionally, not reactively. Clear lanes. Clear rules. Clear collaboration. Will there still be tension at times? Of course. But tension inside a team is different than friction against a competitor. One is healthy. The other is destructive. We’re building the kind of team that can control more of the grid. And if that means I occasionally throw elbows to give you clean air — I’m good with that. Championships require both cars.