Channel Manager's Playbook 2016

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to the partner the best fit or a use case or even that the
competitive advantage. There is so much competition for
network, hosted VoIP, even cloud services that the CM
needs to explain the advantage, or it is a price war.
You see Brand Ambassadors in retail stores often
providing samples of food and drink. Red Bull and
Monster energy drinks send ambassadors to events to
hand out cans and swag. Take that into your world – at
a trade show (use the swag) or from the office (use the
SPIFF or the contest).
And lastly, the CM is there to teach – about the
company, the processes, the promotions, the prod-
ucts and how to sell. (This has been talked about
throughout this series.) Partners won’t propose what
they don’t know – and won’t sell what they are not
comfortable with. The partner is lending her reputa-
tion to the service provider during the sales process to
her customer, who she would like to keep and have a
long relationship with. Partners are risk adverse when
it comes to that. As Benjamin Franklin said, “It takes
many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only
one bad one to lose it.”
It seems like a lot to ask someone to do. Manage
20 to 120 partners; quote for them; answer questions;
reply to emails and phone calls; cajole them into train-
ing, then into proposing; build rapport and relation-
ships; and all of that on a commission plan with quota.
Lots of stress. Lots of triage. So much juggling.
There is no pithy answer to this. It takes time and task
management, following a schedule and, quite frankly,
support staff.
We are in the age of being attached, online, connect-
ed 24/7. Down time is important for health and produc-
tivity. Never forget that. (So is sleep, water and exercise
– walking or movement).
Yet in this age of the magic of smartphones, apps
and clouds, we often do not leverage the technology
available to us to be more efficient – Mailchimp, email
templates, auto-responders, Master Stream, CRM,
APIs, Wunderlist, Trello, Todoist and so many more
apps that integrate with email and CRM (and VoIP).
Channel managers don’t have their own training or
trade show (althought the TCA, , does some
CM training once a year.) There aren’t a lot of places to
discuss best practices, short cuts, technology advance-
ments or the like.
In addition to all of that, there are two other respon-
sibilities that the CM has: recruiting and marketing. We
touched on recruiting in chapter 4. Marketing is a whole
book by itself (and we touched on ways to use social me-
dia and email in other chapters including chapter 3). We
will touch on “Effectively Using Social Media” in a later
chapter of the coming e-book. For now, let’s just say that
email marketing is still very effective, especially to part-
ners that you have a rapport or a relationship with. It is
also highly effective if the email is valuable and not just
press releases or “Sell Our Stuff” kinds of messages.
Email marketing keeps you top of mind. If it is valu-
able stuff, it will elevate you from just another CM to a
great CM. The content can include any of the following:
• tips on getting leads;
• sharing success stories of other partners (since most
salespeople are competitive);
• the top sales of the week;
• a hot vertical;
• first customer of a new product;
• how to get referrals; and
• how to upsell or cross-sell.
Being a conduit works both ways, right? Informa-
tion flows out from the service provider through the CM
to partners (and their prospects and customers). Then
questions, concerns, quote requests flow back to the
service provider from the partners through the CM. The
CM contacts numerous internal departments to get in
touch with the partners. Through this conduit activity,
the CM has many duties including Den Mother, Brand
Ambassador, Closer, Librarian, Teacher, Recruiter and
Storyteller. Balancing all of that is indeed a big job.
How do you motivate partners? Well, if you chose
them properly and on-board them correctly, you will be
well on your way. If not, you’ll have to get creative.
In chapter 3 of this series (see the May/June issue of
ChannelVision), we talked about getting attention (and
some marketing), but there are tactics that can be used to
motivate partners to sell more than just network services.
One suggestion is to add services to the quote. For
example:, MIS or DIA (or whatever you call Internet ac-
cess) is quoted with or without a managed router. How
about with or without cloud backup?
Or what about hosted email? Back in the day, ISPs
offered free email service to customers. Then AOL and
EarthLink made millions of dollars from people who pay
to maintain that email address. You just never know where
the gold will be. With all the noise about Microsoft Lync
and Office365, even agents have jumped into that pool to
sell it to businesses for commissions. This means they are
open to offering services customers will consume.
A CM has to be familiar with the company catalog of
services. There is probably a gem hidden in there some-
where that could make you stickier to partners and their
Chapter 8:
Motivation
17 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK