Maybe It’s YOU That’s Not Adding Value!

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It’s funny how things come in waves. In the last month, I’ve had four conversations with four different vendors, concerned that their sales team is not engaging the channel because their reps believe partners add no value. And while I agree that there are certainly partners who add no value, we obviously wouldn’t be in … Continued

This Channel Thingy Is Getting Complex

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Channel used to be easy. I don’t mean easy for the average man in the street (who thinks it’s a brand of perfume or something you change with a remote). I mean it was easy for those of us actually in the channel. We all understood how it worked. Vendors sold to distributors, who then … Continued

Volume Partners – Selection vs. Collection

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Author: Ian Maclean Over the last few years, Channel Dynamics has conducted many research projects around understanding problems relating to the partner ecosystem. In many instances, the research highlighted that vendors were not focusing enough on recruiting the right partners, or that partners were being on-boarded in a haphazard manner. In other words, anyone could … Continued

Are Service Providers Partners Or Customers?

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I often conduct strategy discussions with vendors who sell through Service Providers, and at some point during the meeting, I’ll ask the question – are Service Providers (ie. Managed Service Providers, Telcos, Cloud providers, etc) your Customer or your Partner? The answer is usually something like “well sometimes they’re customers and sometimes they’re partners but … Continued

Customer Life Cycle Management and The Cloud

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Customer life cycle management is an important issue for every business selling cloud services. Where there was once traditional solution selling around a large capital item followed by install and management, we are now seeing the consumption of IT as a service driven by cloud technologies. Cloud services are usually billed monthly over a fixed … Continued

Is There A Need For The Channel In The Cloud?

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There is no doubt that customers are starting to examine how they procure technology, and opting for a Cloud model rather than the traditional CapEx model. However, while this shift may provide a range of benefits for the customer and potentially the channel, it also brings with it some fundamental changes to the way technology … Continued