In the past several years, channel sales have driven unprecedented revenue growth for many B2B high tech manufacturing companies. While these new routes to market are great for manufacturers, many struggle to quickly and accurately extract information from channel partners. During 2018, I’ve met with numerous companies and heard nightmarish stories about unresponsive partners, unusable and inconsistent data, or data that doesn’t show up at all.
Jay McBain, Principal Analyst from Forrester Research shared, “Indirect sales is notorious for late reporting due to the complexities of receiving reporting from multiple tiers across numerous third-party organizations.”
These sales complexities have introduced a speed to market challenge.
To address this challenge, companies like Model N offer automated channel data solutions to efficiently collect, enrich and eliminate bad POS and inventory data and automate the management of partner interactions.
However, Model N has estimated that approximately 20% of all B2B companies with channels sales have failed to implement an automated solution to solve the speed to market challenge.
It’s hard to image 80% of companies have inferior or no automated solution. For those 20% who are addressing this challenge, many have realized:
- Trusted and validated channel revenue contributions in real-time.
- Verified shifts and trends in global markets.
- Confirmed marketing and channel incentive programs
- Gained insights into better business decisions using reliable data.
Some companies have partially addressed this challenge with homegrown systems or elaborate spreadsheets and added dozen of people to tackle the problem. This may be an alternative, but how long does it take to get reliable, valid and correct data from your channel?
If it takes weeks, months or longer, can you afford to ignore what you don’t know about your channel and the success you guess you’re having? Have you wondered what your competition is doing and how they’ve overcome the speed to market challenge?
If you would like to learn how your company can improve its speed to market with consistent channel data or to learn more about Model N’s Channel Data Management solution, clicking here.
