Jay McBain

The communications industry is facing a perfect storm of converging forces, from COVID-19 to the rise of influencer marketing and even AI. At Forrester, we research around 10,000 global technology vendors that utilize indirect sales and often get asked about the value of PR in the channel. A trend that is affecting many channel leaders […]

With COVID-19 still spreading and broad quarantines, shutdowns, and other measures to contain it continuing, it is still impossible to make definitive predictions of its impact on the tech channel. Instead, we are using three scenarios that take into account different recovery start times and shapes of recovery graphs. More detail around these scenarios, tech […]

How will the technology channel be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic? Read a list of likely scenarios and what it could mean for the long-term.

Legacy metrics don’t reveal the true impact of partner ecosystems. Now more than ever, channel organizations must demonstrate the business impact of their budgets.

The ways B2B buyers and sellers transact are changing dramatically. Learn about the shifts ahead in 2020 and beyond.

With the influx of new channel partner types across the ecosystem, moving them quickly and efficiently from recruitment to productivity relies on automated and scalable onboarding technology. Channel leaders can overwhelm new channel partners with too much information that is not relevant to their role or focus. The unfortunate, and too frequent, result is a […]

  If you haven’t listened to a podcast yet, you’re now in the minority.  According to Podcast Insights, 51% of the US population has listened to at least one podcast. Since the first podcast came on the scene in 2004, there are now over 750,000 podcast shows with over 30 million episodes. What’s behind this […]

Channel professionals want to talk about expanding their partner programs and building broad ecosystems, but the truth is that many of their basic program and channel management processes are still painfully manual and error-prone. Before accelerating their channel program, they need to apply basic automation technologies to get their front- and back-end systems to a […]

With Google and numerous ratings sites at their fingertips, why do partners choose communities? During this time of growing electronic ubiquity, the need for trusted and expert sources of information has increased significantly.

Channel incentives are used to improve indirect sales performance, orchestrate partners’ behavior, and engender channel loyalty. For decades, channel professionals have used channel incentives to drive behavior, whether establishing new behaviors, suppressing old ones, or repositioning partners for a new opportunity. Incentives are also effective in masking deficiencies in business value propositions. Channel incentives and […]

  We have seen more disruption in the channel in the past 18 months than we saw in the past 37 years combined. As a review, here were my 2018 predictions.   1. Private equity will continue its sweep of the channel software space, creating some unicorns along the way. Verdict: As mentioned in the […]

Leverage Channel Data To Give Partners A Better Experience: Winning In The Channel Requires Data-Driven Program Innovation     Brands that provide an enhanced partner experience grow faster than their peers, are more profitable, and drive higher customer satisfaction and retention downstream. Smart channel professionals are looking at data across the partner journey as a […]

ALERT!! – The New 2020 Channel Software Tech Stack is now live.       (CLICK FOR HIGH RES) The channel technology stack is a group of technologies that brands leverage to manage and improve their indirect sales processes and partner programs. Often, the focus of channel technologies is to make difficult processes easier, automate […]

Maturing Into A Horizontal Channel Management Platform Aligned With CRM and Marketing Automation Channel and alliance leaders are known to be good jugglers. With the average partner program containing over 90 distinct components, encouraging channel growth while mediating conflict is a complex undertaking. Partner relationship management (PRM) connects the dots between partner planning, recruitment, onboarding, […]

As of June 2018, Reddit surpassed Facebook to become the US’s most-visited social media platform.[1] And it’s the US’s third-most-visited overall after Google (No. 1) and YouTube (No. 2) and ahead of Facebook (No. 4) and Amazon (No. 5). Furthermore, Reddit users on average spend twice as long on Reddit (more than 15 minutes) as […]

It was 11 years ago this week that Michael Dell penned the infamous memo declaring that Dell’s crown jewel (direct channel business) was a revolution, not a religion. The very thing that anchored its messaging and competitive advantage over the first 15 years was not an absolute. Back then, it was a lesson in customer […]

  Over the past few decades, sales and marketing leaders have been transforming themselves into predictable, data-driven business units. The CRM stage started in the 1990s and accelerated quickly a decade later with lower-priced cloud offerings. The marketing automation stage began to grow exponentially around 2008 and has reached critical mass in its first decade. […]

PartnerWorld kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday and, for the first time, colocated with IBM’s Think main event. The 1,000-plus partners who packed the MGM Grand Arena heard some great messaging around simplified programs, reduced contractual requirements, and a direct sales team who was finally getting channel religion delivered through its paychecks. In the hallways […]

1. Private equity will continue its sweep of the channel software space, creating some unicorns along the way With blockbuster mergers on the channel partner-facing side like Autotask-Datto and on the vendor-facing side such as Relayware-Zift, we are seeing a new trend where point solutions across different categories are combining to create a more holistic, […]