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The channel manager (CM) has a number of differ-
ent roles to play in order to be successful today: Den
Mother, Brand Ambassador, Closer, Librarian, Teacher
and Conduit.
The channel manager is the conduit for the channel
partner to the service provider. All questions, concerns,
complaints and education come through the CM. The
CM has to have relationships internally with a number
of departments to get stuff done. That stuff can include
a sales engineer on a customer call (now!), someone in
billing to handle an issue, or a way to escalate trouble
tickets. Building these relationships internally is vital, but
it is becoming much harder to achieve due to the remote
workforce of many CMs, consolidation and employee
churn, as well as downsizing.
The CM is also the conduit to the commissions,
SPIFFs and promotions, but that is basic, right? At the
very least, the CM provides quotes and promo info.
The CM occasionally acts like a Den Mother, some-
times rounding up partners for training, events, dinners,
even chasing after quotes and sales: “What happened to
that quote?”. One step further is to ensure that partners
get certified or at least educated on new product lines,
such as the Cub Scout Den Mother of yesteryear who
planned activities at meetings in order to get the scouts
badges and moving along the ladder.
Sometimes the CM has to be the Closer, closing the
sale, especially on services that the partner is unfamiliar
with such as security or disaster recovery. Both the CM
and partner need the sales; and this is more common
than I once thought.
Like a Librarian, the CM is there to provide informa-
tion, resources, collateral, webinars, what-have-you, per
partners’ requests – or even better, before they ask. One
key feature here is to not just provide a quote but pro-
vide options. Those options can include:
• a case study;
• a reference (“We just sold to a bank like this. Here is
what they bought…”);
• additional services like managed router or cloud
backup; and
• differentiation or positioning (“We are really good
selling this to…”).
Unless you want to be a quote monkey, the emails
have to contain more than the quote.
That is what being a Brand Ambassador is about.
The CM is the cheerleader for their company. The CM
tells stories about the services in order to demonstrate
Chapter 7:
The Roles of the Channel Manager
One peeve of mine with Level 3 is that while it has
a nice portfolio that includes things such as DDoS
mitigation and content delivery networks, the com-
pany does a poor job of explaining to the channel
who makes a good prospect and why. This is basic
marketing. It isn’t like everyone needs a content de-
livery system.
If you see the average day in the life of an agent,
it is customer-needs driven. The prospect calls to get
a quote for something. Like a rat to cheese, the agent
goes running. The discovery is minimal because the
agent doesn’t want to bother the prospect with ques-
tions – even though by asking questions the agent
could be branding himself.
If a prospect gets asked a question that he has not
been asked before or that makes him think, the salesper-
son that asks that question moves away from being the
average sales guy.
It is called discovery because it is about discovering
needs, wants, pain points and enough information that the
solution offered will be a no-brainer. Sure, you can say that
10MB of Internet access is the same. But is it?
Broadband isn’t the same as dedicated Internet ac-
cess. Besides the service level agreement, there is a
big difference between best effort (“up to”) speeds and
dedicated throughput.
What if the prospect had an office or large presence
in London? Wouldn’t that mean that the better option
for an Internet pipe would be from a provider with a
short route to London?
I have a client making its 2016 three-year plan. It
includes moving to SaaS and hybrid cloud (Rackspace
and colocation). The circuits we will install will have
to come from providers with a direct connect to Rack-
space. It isn’t always about cheap, fast pipes. The ser-
vice providers have to do a better job of explaining the
bigger benefits, especially in the current climate where
cloud is becoming prevalent.
Back to the agent on his average day: if it is customer
driven, the service provider will not ever be top of mind
unless they tell stories about how they get layered on, how
they are different (connect to AWS), and what outcomes
their customers have experienced. That is what the buyer
is looking for today: outcomes.
Certainly, 30 to 40 percent of the market is still look-
ing for cost savings. However, the other 60 to 70 percent
are smarter buyers looking to make strides in their busi-
ness to be more efficient, flexible and competitive. Cloud
services certainly are platforms for that, but so are part-
ners that ask good questions and uncover tidbits that the
customer didn’t think to mention, but allow for a solution
that will deliver a good outcome.
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THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S
PLAYBOOK