Channel Management Best Practices

What is channel management?

Channel management is the work a vendor does to sell through partners rather than directly: choosing which partners to work with, recruiting and onboarding them, enabling them to sell and support the product, planning joint business with them, and managing their performance, incentives and relationship over time. Done well, it turns a partner program into a predictable share of revenue. The Channel Institute teaches channel management through its Certificate in Channel Management, which gives channel teams one shared set of definitions and methods for each of these tasks.

The definitions used throughout are published in the channel management glossary, and the syllabus is reviewed and approved by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP.

Ten channel management best practices

1. Define the channel strategy before recruiting anyone

Decide which markets and segments the channel is meant to reach, and what partners are being asked to do that the direct team cannot. A channel without a stated job tends to acquire one by accident, usually the one that is easiest to measure.

2. Recruit against an ideal partner profile

Write down what a partner likely to succeed looks like, then assess candidates against that rather than against enthusiasm or logo value. Channel partner recruitment is a filtering exercise. Signing partners who will never transact costs more than not signing them.

3. Build the program around tiers that mean something

Tiers should reflect commitment and reward it proportionately. Where the requirements are vague or unenforced, partners discover it quickly and the tiers stop influencing behaviour at all.

4. Agree how both sides will communicate

Partners deal with several vendors and give attention to the ones that are predictable. A stated cadence for reviews, updates and escalations matters more than the volume of contact.

5. Treat enablement as ongoing, not an onboarding event

The gap between a partner signing and a partner selling is where most programs lose their return. Enablement has to match what the partner actually sells and keep pace as the product changes.

6. Measure partner performance against something

Revenue alone hides the picture. Knowing which partners are growing, which are declining and which have never transacted is what makes investment decisions possible, and it depends on channel data being defined and collected deliberately.

7. Pay incentives for the behaviour you want

Incentives are instructions. If the easiest way to earn them is discounting, discounting is what the program will produce. Match the incentive to the behaviour rather than to what is simplest to administer.

8. Invest in the relationship, not only the transaction

Partner managers who appear only at quarter end are treated accordingly. The relationship is what determines whether a partner brings you the next deal or takes it to a competitor.

9. Use systems that give you a current picture

Partner portals, deal registration and PRM tools earn their cost when they reduce friction for the partner. When they exist mainly to serve internal reporting, partners route around them and the data degrades.

10. Review the program against where the channel is going

Partner types, routes to market and partner economics have all moved. A program built on the assumption that a partner buys and resells will fit fewer of the partners it is trying to attract. The Certificate in Channel Partner Ecosystems covers that shift in detail.

Learning channel management properly

Reading a list of best practices and running a channel against them are different things. The Certificate in Channel Management covers the ten areas across ten modules, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark. A certificate is issued on passing the exam rather than on finishing the material, and an employer can verify it.

For teams, the value is that everyone works from one set of definitions. A new hire and a ten-year veteran build a partner plan the same way, which is what makes the practices above reviewable rather than a matter of individual style. See successful channel partner programs for how these fit together into a program, and channel training and certification compared for how the certificate sits against the other options.