Background

In 2022, a leading card payment company announced that channel sales would be one of strategic enablers of the 2025 strategy projecting to double the company’s Services’ division’s revenue every year until 2025. In order to inform the nascent Channel Sales team’s strategy, I conducted research to identify opportunities based on the current state of the channel sales practices at the company. Additionally, through my inquiry into channel sales industry best practices and examples from external organizations, I provided a view on what the future state of the channel sales practice should be.

Approach

Capturing the current channel partner experience

When the initiative was announced, the company had been already partnering with Ernst & Young that acted as a channel partner in selling one of the company’s cybersecurity solutions to Fortune 100 organizations. I used this relationship to identify practices that had been working well and opportunities for improvement for the channel sales practice going forward. This track of research included:

• Stakeholder & subject matter experts (SME) interviews

• An interview with the project lead on the EY side

• The company’s cybersecurity product heuristic evaluation

• Service blueprinting of the current partner experience

I identified a number of opportunities in areas including product capabilities and user experience, sales enablement and support, and pricing.

The state of the channel sales practice at the time of research

Defining what “good” looks like

To define what “good” looks like, I researched best practices in channel sales, conducted external interviews with friends and family familiar with channel sales, and workshopped ideas with the company’s SMEs. As a result, I was able to construct a service map of the future state of the channel sales practice. My recommendations spanned several dimensions:

Product:

• Product teams should be sufficiently stuffed to enable fast development cycles.

• The product to be sold should reflect the latest industry research (eg., research in cyber security) for the product to stay relevant.

Enablement, training, support:

• For robust operations, frameworks for partner onboarding, training, post-sales support, performance, and engagement should be established.

Partner experience (PX):

• To ensure a great partner experience, the practice should establish a PX maturity framework, partner feedback collection and follow-ups.

Marketing:

• Establish a partner demand generation support program to ensure scalability.

What "good" would look like for the new Channel Sales practice

Impact

As a result of following the proposed recommendations, the channel sales team have been able to improve their processes and onboard and enable a number of channel partners including Deloitte, McKinsey, AWX for selling a variety of products spanning from targeting analytics to portfolio health analytics to cybersecurity platforms.