Pursuing large partner investments, commitments or partner-led sales, often in competition with alternative vendors or opportunities, can be a complex, costly and time consuming undertaking for a vendor channel team.

SPI helps vendor channel management teams qualify and secure the vital channel commitments and investments required to deliver a return on investment to both their partner and their own organizations. 

Structured processes help vendor channel management teams cover vital issues and stakeholders, focus and manage channel sales activity, develop more effective competitive strategies, and plan the optimum deployment of precious resources.

SPI’s applications include:

• strategic or competitive partner recruitment
• vendor focus and re-balancing
• new market development
• bundled solution creation…and many more

SPI applies to all forms of partner organization from the largest global SIs and alliance partners to local ISVs and VARs.

Channel Enablers SPI program is more than a training class - it includes a licence to use Channel Enablers best practice checklists, guides and templates that support each stage of the partnering initiative planning process.

SPI has been designed to be modular in its application; this means Channel Managment teams can:

• progressively add levels of analysis due to the complexity of the target organization or size of the partnering opportunity
• invest the amount of time and resource that makes sense for the potential return

Workshop Content

SPI is intended for Channels and Alliances people who directly, or as leaders of teams, develop plans and programs to recruit new partners, grow business through or with major partners, or persuade partners to co-bid on major competitive opportunities. The program is particularly suited to Channel Sales Professionals and Alliance Relationship Managers who are responsible for major partnership relationships that have a need for change, or have potential that warrants an investment in partnership planning.

Where strategic partnering opportunities merit the formation of a ‘bid-team’, all members of the team should attend SPI ‘kick-off’ training, contribute to the development of plans, and help gather required information.

Topics covered in ‘kick-off’ training include:

• identification of partner decision makers and influencers
• assessing the power of key stakeholders and their motivation to affect decision outcomes
• rigorous analysis of a vendor’s position with respect to the objective being pursued
• qualification - analysis of factors that will determine if the partner will invest, change or co-bid
• assessment of the vendor’s competitive position compared against the partner’s alternatives
• consideration of time and resource factors involved
• developing a ‘winning story’ and value proposition

Workshop Benefits

Partnership decisions can have huge consequences. Beyond the revenue of a single ‘sales deal’, a channel decision can affect many opportunities and make the difference between over-quota success and under-quota failure. For this reason channel opportunities must be carefully planned to optimize resource deployment and maximize the chances of success. The SPI process helps organizations to:

• Increase channel revenues by winning competitive opportunities
  • Simple processes and checklists ensure that you don’t miss vital people/issues.
  • Analysis tools help to formulate strategy in complex partnering influence processes and make key value propositions clear.
• Optimize investment in time/resources
  • Recruiting new partners who have strong relationships with your competitors, or convincing partners to make other major investments, are complex, resource-hungry opportunities to pursue. SPI includes best practice processes for assessing competitive positions, likelihood of partner action, size of opportunity and revenue timing.
  • Competitive Strategy - best action plan. Not all Channel Managers have the same ‘instinct’ or experience. Structured processes help take the ‘magic’ out of channel winning strategies.
• Involve and engage others
  • SPI is a common approach/communication tool. Productive forming and re-forming of ‘virtual teams’ is a crucial productivity and competitive success factor in channels. SPI’s teamwork processes, as well as its use of common tools and language, aids this process and helps specialist technical experts, marketing, management, operations and others make a greater contribution to channel sales success.

Workshop Format and Media

SPI training is best run as a combination training class and planning session. Pre-selected channel account managers work in table teams on real partnering initiatives with other members of their channel teams.

Training is named ‘kick-off’ training to denote that it is just the start of a process, and not an end in itself. Ongoing planning and review must follow kick-off training if fledgling SPI processes are to be adopted and deliver meaningful business outcomes.

• The SPI program includes a comprehensive reference guide and workbook, and a set of macro-enabled word processor templates to aid plan creation.
• More than a training class, SPI is a business process that should be integrated with existing processes, and supported by incentives to drive its use in the field.
• Channel Enablers recommends an additional half-day workshop with channel management soon after kick-off training to internalize how the program can be administered, controlled and reviewed.
• It is important that appropriate controls be agreed on by which SPI activity is managed and required, and under which critical channel team resources are allocated.
• Some initial management support, incentive and focus is important to make this a sustainable process - part of “the way we do things around here’ and not just a good idea from a dimly remembered training course.

We believe in small group interactive sessions, so places are strictly limited to ensure quality. Ideal course sizes are between 15 and 20 participants. Larger groups can be catered for using additional Channel Enablers facilitators.