At the airport on my way back to Dallas, I review the events of Intel’s Channel Alliance Summit. I was privileged to open the event with a short keynote speaking to the recent evolution of the Channel. At the Summit (hosted by Intel at HQ), many industry-leading vendors gather to review the state of the channel. They collaborate to improve the health of this all-important customer segment. The Channel is of great importance to the vendor community; we provide ‘touch’ to hundreds of thousands of users, take new technology to market (and provide meaningful feedback) quicker than our competitors, and – most importantly – provide vendors with their most profitable stream of revenue.
It is my observation that the vendors at this Summit are regulars; always a few new guys, but most appear year-after-year. They “talk the talk and walk the walk”. There are, of course, several big names that do not attend. There are many vendors (VMWare comes to mind) that pay lip service to channel partners and never seem to have time for this type of event. At the Channel Alliance Summit, however, we see the best of the vendor community working hard to assist the Channel in overcoming major obstacles to growth. Obviously, I am not at liberty to discuss details of this event or the content delivered. But my message this morning needs no such detail. It is enough to know that many of the Channel’s business partners are sincere; their appreciation for the Channel is genuine. They are ‘in sync’ with our stated priorities and understand our need to market the Channel brand. They fund the development of compliance programs (as we move toward inevitable ‘green IT’ requirements). They provide research data that helps us determine the best [Channel] business models in today’s economy. Most importantly, they remain open-minded to new ways of doing things – new ways to support their Channel.
So often we breakfast with doom and gloom, beginning our days with bad news for the Channel. That MNCs are blocking us out of government bids with compliance regulations they helped design, that the New New Deal has not provided necessary financing for our customers and our companies, and that our migration to a service business model has become – out of necessity – an exodus. As is so often the case with The Media, however, you’re only reading the bad news. The good news is that some of the biggest and most powerful players in the game acknowledge our importance to this industry, and commit time and resources to seeing us grow. The good news is that it is not a huggy-feely thing that diminishes as the relationship matures, friends; their appreciation for the Channel is serious business. We provide them with their richest source of revenue, and they’re dead serious about protecting that…
Tags: Channel sales programs., sales training, vendor sales programs
