Managing a direct sales force is tough, let alone managing an indirect (channel) sales force. The concept of a channel has existed since the existence of fire, when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles how the channel was managed in the Stone Age. That doesn’t need to be the case, however. If you are considering building a channel to sell your products and solutions, or upgrade an existing one, channel marketing automation can significantly increase the efficacy of the deployment and management of your channel network globally.

I consider the Internet as the second Big Bang. Yes, really. It has transformed how we look at the distributed world, and now the evolution of cloud-based software solutions is automating distributed workflow at a rapid pace. Please refer to our article on “Channel Marketing Software – Why The Rapid Emergence?” where we talk about what is truly driving the adoption of channel marketing automation tools and solutions. However, as the great saying goes: Before you automate, think through the steps manually. With that principle in mind, I’d like to share with you a framework that every company must consider before they can deploy mature, end-to-end channel marketing automation that’s comparable to what we provide at ZINFI.

Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners on a worldwide basis and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel management, we have come up with a basic four-step framework for partner lifecycle management (or activities). We break down this lifecycle into four core areas: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management.

As a part of the channel management maturity evaluation, it is essential to understand which phase a company is in when it comes to these four different areas of activities.

Phase 1: Laying the foundation – This is what I call the start-up phase of channel development. When you look at the activities at this level, it basically covers the following:

* Partner recruitment – The company has some basic partner recruitment capabilities in place by running tradeshows, webinars and call-out campaigns. Recruitment is ad hoc, and not really focused around partner profiling or competency development, but more opportunistic.

* Partner engagement – The company knows how to provide a basic infrastructure. In many cases the following are homegrown:

* Partner portal – Tends to be patched together using either open source software, SharePoint or some other web development tools. However, the portal is monolithic, not localized and cannot offer personalized content. With that said, at this stage the basic content exchange capabilities are in place. Some companies in this phase deploy a basic level of channel marketing automation.

* Partner onboarding – Signing contracts, training partners on how to sell and putting business plans together are the core steps in this phase or in short - partner onboarding, but most of these activities are done manually and there are no systems in place to track the progress of partner engagement.