Ten Challenges That Keep Channel Chiefs Up at Night
Unreliable Partner Sales Data
Channel chiefs have limited insight as to what products are selling, who is buying them and in what quantities. Consequently, they go into business decisions pertaining to revenue recognition, estimates for reserves, sales commissioning and sales forecasting partly blind.
No Cost-Effective Worldwide Data-Capture Infrastructure
Designing infrastructure to retrieve and extract unstructured data feeds in different formats from hundreds of thousands global tier-one and tier-two partners is a considerable technical challenge.
Need for a Shared Master Data File
Synthesizing and cleaning partner data without an accurate, current and validated master data file across the channel network is extremely difficult.
Bad Data
Reseller or end-user names on transactions are often not properly assigned to the correct partner and, therefore, may adversely affect partner incentive and sales commissions.
Accurate Partner Compliance and Reporting
Persuading hundreds of thousands of non-incentivized partners to provide high-quality transaction data and fully comply with reporting requirements is a tall order.
Incentive Payment Validation
According to Zyme Solutions, incentive payments account for more than $50 billion of the $1 trillion in sales that flow through the high-tech channel each year. But due to manual or disparate IT systems involving payment validation, high-tech companies may overpay incentives by as much as 15 percent.
Lack of Real-Time Analytics
Due to the sheer volume of channel sales performance data, channel chiefs need insight into sales activities, inventory levels and country-level performance to make better decisions faster.
No Performance Benchmarks
Most channel chiefs have no real idea how they are doing compared with how competitors are faring.
Revenue Recognition
Many chief financial officers and controllers are forced to recognize revenue using incomplete, inaccurate or low-quality data, which often results in incorrect financial reporting and imperfect sales execution, commissioning, credit assignments and planning.
Channel Marketing
Channel chiefs need to justify market development funds allocation. That’s difficult to do without any tools that allow them to see how well programs are working across different market segments.