I came across this video recently, where a former FBI agent walks through body language. He discerns what people are saying when they’re not saying anything at all. 55% of communication goes entirely unsaid. From an arched eyebrow to the shoes a person chooses to wear, every little choice, cue, and movement, no matter how small, mean something.

Once you’re used to observing that level of detail, you’ll feel like a spy, able to pinpoint what someone means or doesn’t mean on the fly. You can even take this approach with channel partners. Move over, James Bond — the Channel Professional is on the case.

Are You Paying Attention?

What are partners revealing with their actions — or inaction — inside your program portal? What insights can you unlock from their activity (or lack thereof)? After all, as with everyone, sometimes what partners say in a conversation does not align with their own marketing and sales activities. Let’s take a closer look at what you can discern from your partners’ portal activities.  

Training Takeaways

Take a look at reporting on your eLearning modules and training courses. Chances are, you’ll get a good idea of who your high performers and earners are based on who’s successfully completed the training opportunities available to them.

On the other hand, if you’re seeing a partner who’s partially completed or attempted one or more courses several times, that’s a sign they could use a little additional help — whether that’s a call from your team or a nudge in the right direction through a targeted campaign encouraging partners to complete courses. Consider including a good incentive for successfully completing the course, too. This light push toward the right training could be exactly what’s needed to turn a good partner to a great partner.

Peek into Program Participation

Active partners who participate in your programs and, most importantly, adhere to the processes you teach them through training materials and campaigns are likely to be your superstar partners. They’re among your most loyal advocates to end users, and the first partners you should turn to when you seek out feedback on what partners want out of your program. They’ll have useful input since they’re the ones poking around in your offerings most often.

Seeing Deal Success Indicators on the Rise? Good News

A partner that’s interacting with co-marketing activities, lead distribution, or demand programs — and whose opportunity pipeline, sales stage percentages and deal sizes are on the rise? That’s a partner you want to keep around as long as you can. They’re sales advocates for your program. Even if they’re not the most active or making the biggest deals, if they’re selling more with every deal, they’re a keeper.

Take a look at the reporting for those partners, too. ZiftONE’s analytics make it easy to isolate any number of factors to determine what’s setting deal-makers apart from the rest. You can also make sure two up-and-coming partners aren’t directly competing for the same leads by checking their territories, leading to a more harmonious, profitable outcome for everyone.

Do you swear by a specific statistic or behavior from partners as indicative of a specific win or worry? We’d love to hear it — drop a note in the comments.

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A channel tech stack can be unwieldy and disconnected if you’re not careful. Without the right reinforcements in place, ChanTech stacks can fail. It’s not crashing of blocks with laughter and some quick scrambling to rebuild the tower. Failure, in this case, will be defined by lower partner adoption, inability to connect closed-loop reporting dots and costly integration projects that never quite deliver. How can you keep the stack from falling apart? Consider using one foundational building block instead of so many individual pieces.

That’s where Enterprise Channel Management can step in. With ECM, there’s a single platform base — one platform to train on, one platform generating channel data, one platform for your partners to conduct all of their business with you. Let’s get back to that unsteady ChanTech stack first, though, and look at what elements are making it go tumbling down.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

Much like the always-doomed tower of blocks, some pieces of your existing channel tech may not be aligned for efficient communication. Sure, there are integrations, but connected point solutions just focus on sharing information between systems, not painting a complete picture. In contrast, a single platform approach can provide intelligence on the entire partner life-cycle. This can answer complex questions like: How much pipeline did we generate from partners we’ve onboarded in the last three months?  

It’s hard to focus on the bigger picture when the individual pieces aren’t fully aligned. As the saying goes, you can’t see the forest through the trees — and these trees could be costing you valuable returns. When the pieces each need attention and there are lots of moving parts between them, it can be more difficult to get down to the hard work of building, improving and maintaining your channel program.

Balance Your Partners’ Needs

Think of the partner experience with all these moving, disconnected parts. We know partners won’t log in to multiple systems for training, deal registration, and sales enablement. Partners will choose the path of least resistance and do business with vendors that make it easy (and profitable).

Without a seamless, fully-integrated login process — one door into an entire platform — partners are not likely to come in and do business. A convoluted login equals business lost to partners who just want to jump in and get right to work on finding leads and making sales. Make a modern, easy-to-navigate entrance. You want partners selling your products, and a simplified, all-in-one experience makes it easier for them to do business. Your partners are your greatest strength in the channel, and a stronger, more stable ChanTech stack directly benefits them.

Are you playing your own dangerous game of moving parts and balancing acts? I’d love to hear how you’re improving or managing your channel tech stack without the whole tower unraveling. If you’d like to learn a little more about effective channel management, take a look at Top 3 Best Practices for Better Channel Program Management — it will help keep your channel tower standing straight and steady.

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