What’s Missing in Your Channel Sales Approach – Digital Motivation?

Today’s successful channel programs need to address a number of partner needs, including:

• Onboarding
• Product Mastery
• Self Service Content Discovery
• Leveraging Wisdom of the Community
• Driving Qualified Leads
• Driving Customer Advocacy
• Partner Certification
• Supporting Deals
• Recognition of top performers and rising stars

To address these needs, some organizations have implemented partner relationship management applications. These applications have focused on automating processes and collaboration. According to a recent Gartner report, “PRM application development has placed an emphasis on the automation of processes and better partner collaboration.[1]” In addition, adoption of these applications is low. Gartner predicts that by 2018, only 20% of B2B organizations will have changed their channel sales approach to focus on commercially available PRM applications.

The challenge remains, how do you get partners to adopt these processes and actually collaborate? Even if you have a PRM application, how do you get partners to use it?

To address the adoption challenge, organizations need to effectively promote their partners. By tapping into an intrinsic motivator such as reputation, organizations are tapping into a more powerful and lasting motivator than monetary compensation. Organizations also need to motivate partners by clearly and consistently communicating the business and financial value proposition to partners in ways that make sense to the partners, not just their end customers.[2] Companies need to digitally motivate their partners holistically — to understand and be competent in selling the products, align their organizations with theirs and perform at increasing levels of sales excellence.

Badgeville addresses the adoption challenge by:

Motivating the entire audience throughout the partner lifecycle

Unlike other solutions that only reward advocates, Badgeville rewards all ecosystem participants. Rewards also given for all the activities partners go through, whether it is to source expertise/product leaders, validate registration, monitor quality or other activities.

Reward partners for activities they do through all systems of record 

Partners use a number of different systems to learn about a company’s products, register deals, collaborate and get rewarded or compensated for their efforts. See the diagram below of the different systems a partner might use. Badgeville serves as the unifying layer that ties all these systems together. But digitally motivating partners to use all these systems, partners then receive specific and/or combined rewards across application platforms. While these separate platforms can introduce friction and loss, Badgeville ties the partner together with a unifying digital motivation layer. Partners can visualize their progress and rewards inside your partner portal and other applications—whether they are for learning and development, onboarding, collaboration, deal registration or advocacy.

Now let’s look at how a couple have used Badgeville ChannelMotivation to achieve their goals:

CDW is a provider of technology products and services for business, government and education. At CDW, Badgeville’s ChannelMotivation solution was deployed on top of its channel training portal. The Badgeville solution drove a 56 percent increase in training completions per reseller, generating a 10% boost in sales confidence. The solution rewarded resellers for in-depth product knowledge, creating more productive partners for CDW.

EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, cloud computing, analytics, and other products and services that enable businesses to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. EMC’s uniquely integrated partner/customer/employee community utilized Badgeville’s ChannelMotivation solution to increase engagement across the EMC Community Network. EMC saw a 20% rise in overall partner engagement, along with a massive surge in revenue.

To hear more on how Badgeville has helped companies motivate their employees as well as partner, register for our next webcast.

[1] Gartner, Market Guide for Partner Relationship Management Applications, Ilona   Hansen, 6 February 2016

[2] Gartner, Tech Go-to-Market: Creating a Compelling Business Proposition to Recruit Channel Partners for Resale and Support, Mark Paine, 24 July 2015

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