The full version of this article was first published at: The Allbound Podcast: Aligning Systems, Processes and People for Partner Success
Keith Lubner, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Channel EQ, joins me, on The Allbound Podcast to discuss determining company readiness for building a channel, and common pitfalls to avoid once your channel exists. Is it the customers that are driving the changes you’ve seen in the channel and causing these organizations to look ahead as opposed to always looking behind? That’s a great question. Customers are a part of it, but really the root cause of it is technology itself. Technology is allowing a couple of things to occur. Number one, especially in the SaaS space environment you’re looking at a complete seismic shift in the way customers are buying now, and the customer journey is a lot different than it was years and years ago. What that is causing a lot of channel organizations to have to do is to change themselves and be more adaptable to the customer and their journey; and the journey is different than it was before. Customers are going into more pilots now and they’re going into more smaller projects and they are able to execute a lot faster. Customers are also able to get to a lot of information around a vendor and their offerings easier than before. Now that vendors have lost a lot of control they need to – especially from a sales perspective – adapt to the environment of that customer. The problem is that there’s a huge gap in skills. There’s a gap in skills from what they were…
Read More: The Allbound Podcast: Aligning Systems, Processes and People for Partner Success