CCI WHITE PAPER2
4. What segments comprise your channel, and how sales and marketing savvy arethey?Do extensive research. Talk not only to your executive management, but also to
people in the eld who deal with the competition and end-customers daily. Include
the sales organization as well as the partners.Pre-work should also include researching laws,resources and other elements thatwill impact the decisions made and actions taken with regard to channel program
development and management. Your Finance Department or Certied Public
Accountant is a source of valuable information such as guidance about whether ornot your company accounts for costs as expenses or as revenue reduction and howto reclassify expenses in the case of program exceptions.Begin with the End in Mind: Establish ObjectivesIf you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there. There are manysuitable program objectives, but any program objectives should support corporateand channel objectives before all else. Simply by establishing clear and measurableobjectives, you are on your way to improved performance. Start with corporateobjectives. Are there revenue or other measurable goals that all business unitswithin the corporation are using as a guide?Also, establish measurement criteria upfront; knowing how success will be measuredat the onset of a new program allows for data capture points to be built into theprocess, making it easier to recognize if the program is on target or not. Next,address the channel objectives. These usually include a subset of the corporateobjectives such as the amount of revenue that must be attained through thechannel, metrics regarding channel recruiting and development or percentage ofchannel program utilization. Regardless, these objectives will act as the beacon forall subsequent planning, allowing for your company to easily determine whether ornot strategies, tactics and results map back to the established goals.
Strategy Still Counts
Once objectives are established and agreed upon, the next step is to develop astrategy for achieving the objectives. Strategy is often confused with tactics and isa step in the process that can be easily overlooked. We caution companies to makeevery effort to establish strategies that map back to the objectives and can also betranslated into actionable and measurable tactics.According to the American Marketing Association, strategy “provides decisions and
direction regarding variables such as the segmentation of the market, identication
of the target market, positioning, marketing mix elements, and expenditures.” Inthe case of channel or trade promotion programs, strategy often involves decisionsabout partner selection and development, how to tier the channel, identifying theneeds and skills of each tier, what types of programs and tools are needed by thechannel to help them achieve their portion of the objectives and the budgets forall elements.A strategy that we have seen used with great effectiveness is what we will callthe Military Strategy wherein the manufacturer is responsible for the “air cover”and the channel is responsible for “frontline ground work.” In other words, the
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