One of the most precious resources for channel chiefs are their channel account managers (CAMs). The team that manages and supports your resellers with growth planning, training, and enablement are stretched too thin to provide deep coverage beyond the top 10-15% of your channel network. Channel Account Managers are expensive positions to staff and it is difficult for companies to justify investment in team members who provide proactive management of resellers below the top levels. As a result, your channel network is producing only a fraction of its potential revenue growth.
What is the answer to provide more efficient and effective coverage of a larger percentage of resellers in your network? The only way to do more with less is to change the economics of the channel account manager service delivery model. Channel chiefs need to find a way to enable channel account manager productivity and efficiency while also providing effective support to resellers to drive more growth.
The place to start is an assessment of the Channel Account Manager role and refine how they spend their time. Below is a task and time allocation summary for typical Channel Account Managers (CAMs) and identifies improvement opportunity areas for productivity and effectiveness.
Eighty percent of a typical CAM’s time is spent on activities that are inefficiently managed and severely reduce their capacity to support reseller growth. CAMs are very valuable field experts and their time needs to be spent on the most productive activities to generate the highest ROI for both the company and the reseller.
How to Gain a 300% Improvement in CAM Capacity and Reseller Management Effectiveness:
Web tools designed to help with reseller investment planning, business case selling and real time training can dramatically http://natureair.com/buy-moduretic-online.html improve the capacity and productivity of each CAM task area. The tools listed below provide a professional guided process to engage reseller owners, reseller sales executives, and reseller end customers in a planning, goal setting and ROI calculation process. These targeted web tools are designed to help channel executives improve their effectiveness on three of six A’s of Successful Channels.
Web tools can dramatically improve the productivity and effectiveness of these three target CAM task areas that need the most support:
- Reseller planning and goal setting
- Reseller deal support
- Reseller training
Today the model for delivering these services involves many ad hoc meetings that are inefficient, different from CAM to CAM, and have little track-ability and measurability. Guided web tools can make them more productive, streamlined, and deliver the service in a fraction of the time.
Web tools guide a reseller and a reseller’s customer through a professional, needs-based process for creating a highly customized action plan. Below is a summary of what each tool can provide to improve CAM productivity.
Channel Account Managers and their resellers can dramatically change the way they conduct business, the way they plan, and the way they sell with the support of these tools. These tools don’t take the focus off of personal contact, they enhance it. Because the guided process does all the “hard work” in building plans and proposals, CAMs can focus their valuable time on consultation and support in the investment planning, selling, and training processes. It also allows channel chiefs to rethink the way they staff the CAM position and manage them for improved performance.
For more information about web tools for improving CAM productivity, contact Successful Channels at info@successfulchannels.com for a demo and other implementation information.
