Growth through excellent channel planning

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Your channel management strategies need to align to specific business outcomes.

Obviously, a company’s channel management efforts need to reflect the company’s corporate objectives. Every successful business aligns its activities to its goals.

But does everyone have alignment around those goals? Is there clear accountability? Do people see how their efforts are essential to the overall success of the company?

In many companies the answers are not always yes to these questions.

You must approach channel planning in a manner that drives out this ambiguity. You need to document your growth plan for each business objective:

• Recruit. Add partners or direct sales resources to your existing routes to market.
• Develop. Establish a new route to market either through new or existing channel and direct resources.
• Grow. Expand and extend the capabilities of existing partners and direct resources to extend product or customer offerings.
• Prune. Increase efficiency and effectiveness by redirecting resources from low performing elements to higher performing elements.

Successful channel planning has five imperatives:

• Identify which company objectives rely on channel management.
• Assess your current route to market strength.
• Understand your ability, and need, to scale across multiple dimensions.
• Define your growth strategies for each desired business outcome.
• Cascade accountability throughout your organization.

Robust channel planning provides the foundation for channel management success.