Closing business through the channel – Do you have partners that can’t sell or won’t sell?

Channel Enablers' Breakfast Connection events provide a forum for discussing important partnering trends and activities. Any interested Vendor executive or partner manager can participate free of charge.

With a decreasing number of quality Channel Partners, meeting your quarterly numbers often depends upon the ability or willingness of your existing Channels Partners to sell!

Have you recently experienced:

• a significant shortfall in your end of quarter channel sales forecast commit?
• partners holding out for a better deal at quarter end?
• complaints from your sales teams that your Channel Partners don’t have the same sense of urgency that they do at quarter end?
• channel Partners commit to close a deal by quarter end, but it slips to next quarter?  

 What ways have you tried to fix these problems? Do you:

• send your sales people out to close Partner led deals - therefore increasing your sales operating costs?
• offer big discount “special” prices to help Partners to close business - which reduces your sales margin and increases theirs?
• throw quarter end incentives at your Partners, training them to wait for the best incentives before they close sales?
• have your Channel Managers micro-manage all large Partner led opportunities - turning them into transaction managers and leaving no time to focus on increased channel capacity or better partner enablement?

Join many of your industry peers at our last Breakfast Connection Briefing for 2007 “Driving quarter-end business through the channel” to talk about what can be done to influence the timing of channel revenue within a quarter. How do you smooth the revenue curve within a quarter and move channel revenue out of the last week?

We will look at these four questions in a little more detail, one by one, to discuss what can be done.

• Are there characteristics of your products that create seasonality variations?
• What factors influence how and when your products are bought? Are these contributing to the ‘hockey stick’ effect?
• What Vendor behaviors and Programs drive undesirable Partner behaviors? Are partners driven to wait till quarter end or worse – to let opportunities slip?
• Do your Channel Partners behave in a way that exacerbates quarter end problems? What can you do about this?

Our channel experts will be available immediately following the presentation to take specific questions and provide you with practical tips to improve the ‘evenness’ of your sales quarters.

Who should attend?

All Partnering Professionals (channel or alliance sales and marketing, business development managers, high-tech executives, and all interested parties) especially those responsible for the channel sales target.  Bring your team and participate in an informed discussion of the latest industry trends!

Upcoming Breakfast Connection dates and locations are:

Singapore, Apr. 2nd, 2008 - Registrations at 8.30am for a 9.00am start.

Participation is FREE, but registration is required as space is limited. By registering to attend this Breakfast Connection briefing you will automatically be registered for the Channel Enablers Partner Manager Alliance Program.