Our Services

We add channel expertise to your business and provide advice that empowers your channel partners and resellers.

Some of our frequently requested services include:

• Partner program assessment/benchmarking to industry best practice
• Partner program development/enhancements to deliver against your channel vision
• Channel partner enablement planning to bring your partners to the skill level you require for success
• Partner contact strategy development to ensure the right people get the right messages at the right time
• Building business cases for justification of your investment in channel program creation
• Partner program satisfaction scoring to ensure accurate delivery of value to partners

So, what process do we use to help develop or validate a vendor channel strategy? First we listen! We want to understand your channel vision. And don’t worry if you haven’t got one yet – we can help with that too! Three simple questions:

1. What would you like your channel to look like in 5 years’ time?
2. How would you measure that success?
3. What milestones should be in place to attain that vision?

Seemingly simple questions, but so many times it turns out they are bigger than the meaning of life itself! This is where the human side of The Planet Group comes into play. Our soft skills and years of relevant marketing services’ experience will help and encourage your channel sales and marketing leadership to articulate and build your channel vision and your contact strategies. Building upon your own ideas, we validate your assumptions through market and analyst research to align what you think you should deliver, against what partners actually want.

It’s really amazing how many vendors think the same way about the partners; they simply don’t
understand partner drivers or put themselves in the position of their partner before they roll
out a promotion or enhance their partner program.

Neil Cook
Senior Director SMB EMEA Channels, Symantec

So, do we simply just play back your ideas to you? Of course we listen and question your assumptions, but our value is in the experience of what we have already seen fail and work well. And yes, we will challenge you if appropriate! Our process for Channel Strategy Development Assessment follows the broad steps below.

Driving Channel Sales

Click image to enlarge.

This can be a detailed multi-week engagement, bringing together teams to produce a common understanding and set of objectives to deliver against, or just a few days’ review of everything you already have in place. At each core step we will provide examples of the likely investments and returns we have seen with other vendors. Your assessment of the scope of any engagement needs to reflect your own success metrics.

If you would like to discuss how we might help with channel consultancy strategy development, channel marketing execution or channel technology infrastructure to develop your business further, please call us on +44 (0)1491 639850 or email us on info@the-planet-group.com.