IT Marketing World

Channel Organizations Need a Roadmap for Enablement

The concept of “practice enablement” has started to get some attention at channel events I’m attending (if only because I’m encouraging the conversations)!

Getting above traditional onboarding and training—and encouraging a more holistic, dynamic enablement strategy to help partners drive services and solution revenues with your offerings at their foundation—is attractive to the channel organizations I’m speaking to.

Focusing on practice enablement is a way to differentiate your company from competitors with similar offerings. Moving a partner from a reseller model to “solution practice” is a huge win for your company, and can provide valuable benefits and profits for the partner.

I typically talk about these topics from a content perspective; how are you providing the market vision and value leadership that will help partners develop their practices?  How are you looking beyond the next sale or the next quarter’s targets to build a sustainable, growing practice?

Many channel organizations make the mistake of taking the product to market first, and not putting the partner in the forefront. Your company has likely already done the work to position the product in the marketplace (market need, value prop, etc).  It’s the channel organization’s job to make it relevant to the partner and illustrate the overall value message to the partner, and encourage the investment required to really succeed with your solutions.

We put together this graphic as the baseline for our upcoming ebook, Content Strategies for the Channel Landscape. We’ll dive deeper into each section, and provide some actionable information around how channel organizations can achieve these goals.

Looking forward to further discussion and development around practice enablement and channel enablement overall.

Eric Nitschke is VP of Client Services and Managing Director at Launch International.  Eric uses his experience at Launch International to deliver a best-practices approach to client management, sales enablement, thought leadership, whiteboarding and channel development and enablement.  To read all blogs published by Launch International click here.