Channel Partners

When discussing brands’ direct-to-consumer (DTC) digital strategies, I am often asked how brands are handling issues of channel conflict with retail partners. There are a few forerunners to my response: A brand’s DTC digital strategy is not just about direct transactional sales to consumers. All brands need a DTC digital strategy, which derives value beyond […]

Elucidate Subscription-Based Hardware Offerings Public cloud innovations influence your technology decisions in many ways. Cloud pricing is shaping the pricing for on-premises data center infrastructure. I receive many client calls around evolving subscription-based hardware, and those discussions reveal their confusions. As you aim to make an optimal decision for your business, let’s develop an understanding […]

Organisations are not always fully in control of all of their customer’s experiences. Whether it’s logistics partners supporting a retailer’s delivery experience, insurance companies relying on sales via brokers, or consumer-facing brands relying on retail partners to sell their products, an organisation’s end-to-end customer experience (CX) often relies on external business partners. Across industries, brands […]

The business opportunity for channel partners is larger than most vendors realize. Transform a linear transaction into exponential growth.

The value of a brand’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) digital presence goes beyond direct sales. Brands that still rely heavily on retail partners for digital sales can still drive value from direct customer engagement. Of course, DTC consumer purchases benefit brands with better margins, since they avoid fees or commission charges from partners. The benefits go beyond […]

Management and growth of the channel is too important to be left to chance. Here are the five actions to take in Q4 to ensure you and your organization are ready to begin building your 2022 channel sales plan.

Out of the 14 different spheres of influence that we track at Forrester, the channel industry trade press ranks near the top. Smart vendors and distributors know that the magic of finding, influencing, recruiting, enabling, and nourishing a top-performing channel boils down to three simple questions about partners: What do they read? Where do they […]

The channel is very large, highly diverse, and incredibly decentralized. Channel partners know that to be successful, they need to carve out a niche — whether that be by line of business, by industry (and, increasingly, by subindustry), by size of customer, geographically, technologically, and by business model. These six vectors are not mutually exclusive, […]

With more than 2 million podcasts available how do you find the best channel podcasts? Forrester's Principal Analyst Jay McBain has you covered. Check out the list of the best 100 channel podcasts of 2021.

A Forrester channel TEI study highlights the economic metrics and the business advantages to choosing to work with that partner. These studies can explain and break down the economics and the outcomes of a partnership investment in real-dollar terms partners understand — not just gold, silver, and bronze.

I made a prediction in January of 2018 that IT distributor disruption would continue. It was obvious that industry consolidation was accelerating, major distributors were diversifying, and private equity was getting more interested in transforming the industry. In the second half of last year, the two largest global IT distributors were acquired by private equity, […]

  Last year ended up being a tale of two cities for the channel. On one hand, customers and governments recognized partners as an essential service and central to their ability to rapidly respond to a worsening pandemic early in the year. With catlike reflexes, the IT channel emptied the laptop supply chain and became […]

^CLICK IMAGE FOR FULL SCREEN^ The channel software stack comprises a group of technologies that help companies develop, design, and execute plans to find, recruit, onboard, develop, enable, incent, co-sell with, manage, measure, and report on partners. Delivering automation of indirect sales processes, workflows, and partner programs, channel software is becoming increasingly critical to a […]

In what was one of the most challenging years for many of us, the channel experienced more change in 2020 than in the past 39 years combined. Revisit our 2020 channel predictions, and see which of our calls proved true, which accelerated, and what it means for 2021. That being said, many of the calls that I did make not only became true but accelerated due to COVID-19. That being said, many of the calls that I did make not only became true but accelerated due to COVID-19.

B2B channel chiefs often forget or overlook the impact that partner profiling has on the indirect business. An ideal partner profile is a “job description” for hiring new partners, and this profile data is connected to every decision that a channel chief will make.

As brands increasingly use different types of partners to reach, influence, transact, and retain customers, partner relationship management (PRM) solutions are being asked to serve both traditional and nontraditional channels at a new level of scale and personalization. Managing these growing ecosystems in a consistent, predictable, and productive way is critical to the success of […]

A couple of years ago, I made the prediction that we were entering the third stage of sales and marketing — the decade of the channel ecosystem. With over 75% of world trade flowing indirectly, I started to sense an influx of investment in and attention on indirect sales by firms in all industries. Looking […]

Even in the best of times, starting the new year off fast is important. With the continuing uncertainty and turmoil caused by COVID-19, channel sales leaders must act now to ensure their team can hit the ground running on day one of the new year.

Online marketplaces have been around in one form or another for decades. Accelerating the trend is a myriad of factors including changing buying behaviors and demographics, companies shifting to subscription and consumption models, and the rising importance of ecosystems. Put simply, the future business buyer will look more and more like a consumer.