The Three Essential Strategies of Partner and Channel Management

The Three Essential Strategies of Partner and Channel Management

Channel management is the most effective way to achieve success for channel-dependent businesses, especially when combined with other management solutions. Today, most high-tech companies are interested in investing substantial amounts of money to promote and sell products and services through associated portals and channels. However, such a multi-channel strategy is difficult to follow, hence the vital role of channel managers in the distribution chain.

A manager is often the dominant company in the channel value chain and is responsible for being proactively involved in designing and executing a company’s go-to-market strategy. They extend the intra-company framework that allows different partners and end consumers to conduct business more easily and efficiently. This move increases brand equity, market share, and profitability. The role of the delegates is based on critical elements such as coordination and influence; the different roles in the channel distribution network; excellent response to the demands and needs of the final consumer; and return on investment and margins for all channel partners. But what are the specific strategies that stewards employ to ensure effective channel management?

Channel management uses three strategies, which are partner portals, e-marketplace, and volume channel.

• Storefront or eBusiness Partner Portal: This strategy gives companies the ability to create specially dedicated, tailored or personalized portals for channel members and their customers. These portals allow partners to offer self-service tools that can be used to search catalogs, look up product details and information, configure solutions, view change orders, track shipments, and receive invoices for payment. In addition, they offer a certain set of product catalogs and pricing information that are based on the needs of partners and customers. It is deeply integrated into the channel acquisition system. Larger clients and affiliates generally prefer this approach.

• eMarketplace: The reality is that it is costly and virtually unmanageable to offer partner portals for every channel partner. This makes it critically important to reduce the number of product segments through platform standardization and functional modularization. These will then be offered through an electronic marketplace, which is more suitable for organizations that are at the forefront of their value chains. Typically beneficial to midsize businesses serving small and midsize businesses, this strategy is a single platform for order fulfillment and provides flexible means for partners to enable brokerage to bundle products with various accessories, services, and the like. .

• Volume Channel – This approach focuses on the efficiency of operations in the distribution of product knowledge and the continuous process of requests for quotes and returns. In order to guarantee the successful execution of the model, it is important to take into account the key elements that are less complexity and variety of products offered, high self-service of partners and clients, and close monitoring of Key Performance Indicators and Distributors, and ODM/CM. Service Level Agreements. This is most useful in scenarios where the complexity of the products is low.

The real challenge, however, is choosing the appropriate strategy or approach. This necessitates the need for a thorough evaluation of individual companies before making a decision. The choice should be based on a framework that depends on factors such as the relative size and dominance of partners and customers, existing business relationships, and product complexity.

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