Building Successful Partner Channels - Hans Peter Bech - E-bog

Foreword by Preben Damgaard "Building Successful Partner Channels" is a book laying out the roadmap for achieving global market leadership through independent channel partners in the software industry. The book applies the business model and business model environment frameworks developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and concludes that taking the indirect route to market adds an additional layer of complexity to our business model as we leave the control of finding, winning, making, keeping and growing happy customers to third parties. The book explains that the direct and the indirect go-to-market approach are not options we can choose freely between, independent of the nature of our business model and business model environments and it discusses when the indirect go-to-market approach is applicable and advantageous and when it is not. The book concludes that taking the indirect route to market requires that the channel is an integrated element of our product offering and value proposition. The indirect route to global market leadership requires developing and maintaining a channel partner program and the book lists all the elements of this program including the critical channel partner P&L model. The book concludes that our partner program will change substantially as we move from early stage channel building to the mature mode where most of our revenue comes from existing channel partners. The book describes the process for channel partner recruitment, and concludes that the initial process is very similar to the process of hiring top performing sales people. However, where we pay staff to perform their duties from the day they join, channels partners will have to make substantial investments before they reap the benefits of the cooperation. Channel partner recruitment is therefore initially a long process requiring substantial investments. The dynamics of channel partner recruitment changes as we move from the early mode channel development stage to the mature stage and the book recommends that we should recruit as many channel partners as we possibly can. We then let them demonstrate where they belong in the channel pyramid classifying channel partners and the book discusses how we should manage each group. A full chapter is devoted to discuss adopting the indirect channel approach at a later stage after having applied a direct approach first, introduces some simple sanity checks to verify if switching is feasible and explains how this switch can be accomplished.

This book explains what it takes to build and manage partner channels in the software industry. The book uses the business model framework introduced by Alexander Osterwalder. It provides a practical guide for organizing the activities required to design productive partner programs as well implement these programs for the recruitment and management of partners that will find, win, make, keep and grow happy customers on our behalf.

The author started building independent channel partner networks in 1986. Coming from a small domestic market he was forced to build international channel partner networks very early in the lifecycle of the startup where he was responsible for revenue generation. He also had to do it with very little resources. He learned that we do not have to be big to be smart. Even small software companies can build powerful independent channel partner networks over time – if they understand the fundamentals. The crucial difference between doing business direct and indirect is hidden in the business model of the resellers. Software companies and their resellers have completely different value propositions and business models. The channel approach is all about understanding and supporting the resellers’ business model.