Another point is too evaluate your channel from a technical perspective. See which channel partners offer technical support to clients and which offer a preceived support (The reseller tells you how great the service, but the clients tell you it’s not adequate). Every reseller will tell you how great their services are, but as a developer, you need to test a resellers ability. What I did was have different levels of resellers by technical ability for each product. (i.e. A reseller can by proficient on services and support on Product “A”, but not product “B”. In that case, the reseller would get a higher commission on product “A” and either a small Finders Fee or no commission on product “B”. That opens up the door for strong support and services in all your products, since the manufacturer or another reseller can provide the service and support for product “B”.

I think you have summed up the issues very succinctly. Matt’s addition of lead distribution / management is also very important. We have seen vendors really struggle over this point, almost to the point of failure.

We are seeing, that in this economic climate, the problem described in Point 1 is becoming more prevalent. We work primarily with vendors, but we have a couple of clients who are resellers and they have suffered a great deal from short term target management by their suppliers – none of whom are our customers I hasten to add!

David Long
mktgSUITE.com

Thanks for the feedback. Nice addition to the discussion.

Phil

Good, solid thoughts. I would add that one should also ‘allow’ or expect value-added channels to use other suppliers. The challenge here is that if your company is truly ‘best of breed’ then you should expect this to seldom happen. If it does, then pay close attention because if the channel chose something other than your (similar) product find out why – there may be attributes you need or want to improve!

Keith Cornell
CEO
Empower Interactive
London