Many Channel Marketing Automation vendors today provide tools such as email marketing, event marketing, and web and social content syndication. However, it’s questionable whether these tools are enough in themselves to stimulate demand and channel engagement. So what else is needed to complete the demand generation tool set, and how can a technology vendor make sure they buy the right system, and pay the right amount to achieve the desired ROI? These are important questions; moreover, for larger vendors they need to be considered in a global context.First-generation Channel Marketing Automation tools typically offered web syndication, event marketing and email marketing. In the ensuing phase, most Channel Marketing Automation vendors – like ZINFI – introduced tools like social syndication and on-demand webinars. While these tools were somewhat effective in building sales pipeline, their impact was only moderate. In an effort to understand more, ZINFI last year undertook an extensive, in-depth channel partner survey, which has provided useful insights on the elements needed and changes necessary to drive higher utilization and better return from channel marketing automation platforms.Time is a prime concern. Channel partners are tightly focused on sales and technical support and only in comparatively rare instances have dedicated marketing staff. So while vendors offer easy mechanisms to issue simple email blasts or implement pre-prepared web content syndication, they can’t overcome the fact that the partners are busy – VERY busy – elsewhere. Most vendor tools are potentially useful, but not sufficiently so – they don’t go far enough. Technology vendors therefore need to look at other ways to energize their partners to undertake marketing. One effective way is to provide a set of integrated tools that is not only easy to use but also preconfigured for various types of campaign.Any effective demand generation platform must incorporate the following tools and functionality:* Lead Management– While most Channel Marketing Automation platforms offer basic capabilities to upload leads (or records of potential prospects or existing customers) a true lead management platform needs to include a traditional customer relationship management (CRM)-like interface, for two main reasons:* For ease of use, the lead management system needs to connect both to the technology vendor’s and the partners’ own CRM system in order to enable data to flow seamlessly back and forth* Most partners today use a CRM system such as Salesforce.com, so providing them with a CRM-like interface for lead management will drive adoption faster.* Lead distribution– Most vendors provide leads to their top tier partners, but to build pipeline and promote best practices beyond this rarified level, it’s critical to create a competitive environment for lead distribution. The Channel Marketing Automation tool must be able to distribute leads to pre-defined partner sets, whether to a small segment or to all partners, e.g. in a shark tank mode.* Campaign-specific tools– Not all tools are relevant for everything, so it’s important to determine the purpose of each campaign. Social and search marketing are effective for awareness generation. Email, Events and