The question I’m most often asked by organizations who are in the process of developing a channel is, “Where should we start?”  Realistically, before you can intelligently address questions about factors like market vertical, target customers, and internal organizational structure, you need to clearly understand that in order to justify the existence of a channel…

“Business generated by the channel must exceed your current margins in order to justify the effort”

• Are the right metrics being used to evaluate the health of the sales channel?
• How many under performing partners are members of the channel?
• What do partners need to be successful?
• Are we providing this needs in an easily consumable fashion?
• Are we listening on the same frequency that our partners are speaking to us on?
• How effective are the programs associated with recruiting, onboarding and nurturing partners?
• Is the process for removing under-performing partners elegant or do we stick our heads in the sand and hope they’ll just fade away?
• If we differentiate our partners by way of verticals how does that help them help their customers?
• How can we get partners working with each other to improve their effectiveness while subversively bolstering our brand?
• Is our channel strategy sensitive to the changing needs of our customers, partners and the market overall?
• How does our channel differentiate itself from our competitors’?
• What does it mean to have ‘enabled’ a partner?
• What are the costs associated with enabling a partner?
• Is our channel sized appropriately to close the amount of business we need it to?
• Is our internal structure a help or hindrance to our channel’s success?

-       Product Marketing & Management

-       Engineering

-       Channels Enablement

Each group is responsible for disseminating information commensurate with their job responsibilities. As follows, they bear the burden of creating slides and presentations that communicate sales and technical concepts from multiple perspectives. This often leaves the audience to sift through a number of slides and discern which slide or set of slides best suits their needs.

Solving this issue saves time and helps to preserve, promote and strengthen your brand. On the surface the process of creating an effective slide library seems cumbersome. I can assure you it is less complicated than it seems and will prove more valuable than you can imagine.

Step 1: Make the slides easily available

Making the slide library easily accessible is a no brainer. Making it available regardless of the office productivity suite (MS Office, Open Office, etc.) is another story.

Most slides are authored in PowerPoint although they are often consumed, edited and presented via Google Docs and Open Office. Although these office platforms are designed to work together, formatting nuances don’t always translate.

Deploying a slide library where the user can output a presentation in PDF, Open Office or Microsoft Office formats solves this problem handily. Enriching the slide library with the ability to search, sort and order the slides inline only enhances the experience overall.

In short, this capability:

-       Alleviates the need for the entire library to be downloaded

-       Ensures branding and formatting are consistent across versions

-       Guarantees current versions of the library are always available

Step 2: Communicate how to use slides and presentations

Communicating how to use the library of slides is key to their effective and ongoing usage. This will limit the creation and use of rogue presentations that use outdated and/or off brand material.

To effectively communicate the “How To” for slides and canned presentations use the following guidelines:

-       Communicate the value of the library to the audience upfront

-       Demonstrate how to use and build presentations

-       Communicate which audiences the slides and presentations address

-       Organize the slides and presentations by audience type

-       Retire old information regularly

-       Provide a method for communicating when library updates have occurred