Partner Connections™ is an end-to-end value chain, strategic framework that makes

explicit knowledge about two critical relationships – Vendor/Partner and Partner/End

Customer – and uncovers the mechanism behind those relationships to develop road

maps for increasing sales.

Partner Connections™ places new insights into a vendor’s partner relationships at

the center of channel management’s practices and provides a basis for discovering

new strategies and tactics to profitably grow the channel.

Partner Connections™ is based on the fact that a vendor’s channel equity is a

function of two critical relationships:

The Vendor <--> Partner Relationship

The Partner <--> End Customer Relationship

These two relationships, and not the partner itself, are channel management’s critical

assets. Improving the quality in these relationships through insight and

understanding creates new demand-side growth.

Why Building Channel Sales Needs a New Strategic Basis

Channel Management spends an inordinate amount of time evaluating their

channel program.

They are likely to invest in competitive research that compares their programs

with those of their product competitors.

Channel Managers rely on syndicated studies that compare vendors by product

category as a measurement of their value in the channel that can vary widely

from year-to-year with no clear understanding of the why behind those

variances.

All of these activities are about giving total weight to the Vendor/Partner

relationship. Why? Because channel management has been based on data that

measures how vendor programs compete for partner mind share --- assuming

that share is dependent on how the partner slices and dices program

differences among vendors.

What have been missing are insights into understanding the nature and quality of the

Partner/End Customer relationship and how Channel Management can use that

understanding for generating new sales growth with partners.

Partner Connections™ arms Channel Management with insights into the two critical

relationship assets that they can affect for growing channel equity and profitable

sales -- their relationship with the partner and the partner's relationship with the end

customer -- rather evaluating than program attributes particularly as they compare

with other vendors' programs. For more information about Partner Connections™,

contact us for a detailed brief: Partner Connections: A Demand-Side Channel

Management Tool.