Several years ago, one of my mentors suggested that I refine my go-to-market strategies using what he called “Channel Science” – a combination of words not easily understood in channel management practices today. While there is no dearth of consultants or so-called business transformation experts who can elaborate on how to design and run channel programs, implement partner portals, or automate channel sales processes – most of them, incredibly, miss the “Science” or “Data” aspects of the problem. As a result, several manufacturers in the over $1 trillion-a-year high-tech industry continue to run their global channels with a patchwork of spreadsheets, low-quality transaction data, ill-defined customer/partner information, and incentive programs run amok – all facets of the underlying problem of channel visibility. Furthermore, IT projects aimed at addressing the “channel data” or “channel visibility” problem continue to be a low priority – a frustrating experience for channel and sales operations managers.

Thankfully, there is an answer – and, no surprise in today’s ‘Big Data’ world, it lies in the data. Having guided several leading high-tech companies through various aspects of this problem, we have compiled some learnings that might well be on the list of 2012 resolutions for any Channel Operations team:

Step 1: Data? What Data?! Seriously, I have heard this refrain too often. Capturing high-quality data from your global partners (especially Tier-1) is an imperative. Simple as this task may sound, difficulty making it happen for any partners other than the 10-20% providing EDI or equivalent feeds is one of the top reasons for our customers to engage with us. Automating and standardizing the global data capture process and getting daily or weekly visibility into sales transactions is a non-trivial problem that most organizations classify in the “Do Not Try This At Home” category.

Step 2: How Dirty is Your Data? The “heavy lifting” – validating, identifying, matching, enriching – to generate a clean, meaningful data set can make all the difference. Most organizations have a difficult time identifying their partners and end-customers in a transaction – let alone having the confidence to pay their sales people commissions based on those transactions. Having the right product/SKU code, the correct partner/end-customer name, sales territory, price, etc. goes a long way in making the data trustworthy and usable across the organization.

Step 3: Show Me the Money! Incentive programs – love ‘em, hate ‘em. Incentives and rebates of all kinds, estimated at 10% of sales (yup, that’s $100B+ for those CFOs counting), have proven to be a major driver of sales. However, the complexity of rebate programs and the inability to track them has meant significant profit and margin erosion. Worse yet, piles of claims waiting to be processed by Finance mean dissatisfied partners, and by extension, a dissatisfied sales force. A robust solution for program tracking and validation could turn a major headache into a source of significant savings. (Click here to join a webinar on this topic.) Revenue recognition is another example where the Finance organization is left to piece together projections that are incomplete without the availability of accurate data.

Step 4: Analyze This! Turn Channel Managers into Power Users. Who says channel account and sales managers don’t like data? Our experience indicates that when presented with high-quality channel data in easy-to-use dashboards, managers and analysts love to slice and dice the data by product, geography, sales rep, territory, channel class, time – and make critical decisions on a daily basis. Examples include inventory planning for product transitions, holiday bursts, sales territory assignment, culling the partner base, and more. Throw in market segments, channel trends, and benchmarks to compare their regions and partners against, and you give them true sales intelligence. In many cases, they will know more about their partners’ business than the partners themselves!

Step 5: Come Together, Right Now! Integrate with CRM/PRM. Sales organizations are increasingly relying on CRM to help streamline their sales processes – including partner interactions. Once you have good channel data, why not provide this visibility to your field sales – right within your CRM environment? Think about the data-driven conversation a Channel Account Manager can have—for example, with VARs in his/her sales territory, about recent Opportunities, or recruiting and cultivating new partners – when armed with the latest view of sales and inventory levels, all available as part of the VAR’s CRM Account profile.

Importantly, these steps have had proven success — just ask the dozens of Zyme customers who have become “Channel Smart!”