Enable Your Partners Till They’re Unconscious

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In a previous article, I wrote about the parallels between recruiting people and recruiting partners, and how the principles we apply to recruiting staff are equally applicable to recruiting partners. Today, we look at the parallels between developing staff and enabling partners. Over the years, the “Conscious Competence” Model has become a popular and insightful … Continued

Innovate, Partner or Perish

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I’m not normally an early adopter, but I was one of the first people to buy a Windows mobile phone. And I loved it. It let me receive email, synced with my diary and contained all my contact details. Then Apple released the iPhone. And it took me a few years (like I said, I’m … Continued

Treat Your Vendors Like Customers

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Look up the definition of “customer” in pretty much any dictionary and you’ll get a definition that goes something like “a person or organisation that buys goods or services from you”. But smart resellers understand that their customers include another definition, namely, “a person or organisation that SELLS goods or services TO you”. I’m talking … Continued

Sell through Partners, not to them

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It is a constant source of surprise to me how often Channel Managers (and I’m talking about intelligent, professional, and experienced individuals) inflict product presentations on their partners that they would never want to sit through themselves. Ask someone what they hate about PowerPoint, and you nearly always get the same answers (too many slides, … Continued

Channel Management – A New Era

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What a difference a year makes! As channel consultants, we get a feel for the health of the industry by the type of projects we are asked to work on. And over the last twelve months we’ve seen a real shift from tactical, short-term return projects, to strategic, longer-term projects designed around building strong sustainable … Continued

What Else Is On The Menu

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You probably never thought that eating a salad could help you grow your business! In this article that appeared in CRN, Moheb Moses talks about the dangers of assuming how much your customers actually know about your business, and gives some valuable advice on how you can build stronger relationships with customers. http://www.crn.com.au/News/168877,opinion-what-else-is-on-the-menu.aspx

Play To Your Strength

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I know it sounds absurd in today’s environment, but I used to work for a distributor selling a word processor, and we used to make 30% margin (before you start thinking I was being greedy, I’ll say that our resellers also made that kind of margin). The year was 1988 and the product was WordPerfect. … Continued

The IDEAL Vendor

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In a previous article about Partner Recruitment, we talked about partner profitability, and the need to provide a compelling value proposition for partners to want to sell your product. In today’s economic climate this has never been more valid. Partners are driven by profit. Not revenue, not discount percentage, not market share; … Profit. And … Continued

Managing the Channel in Uncertain Times

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As the press fluctuates between “doom and gloom” and “light at the end of the tunnel” scenarios, the only thing we can be certain of in the short term is “uncertainty”. And while the financial system is predominantly at the centre of this turmoil, the current global financial situation (coupled with the significantly lower and … Continued