The joint Avangate – The VAR City webinar is just what the title says: a 60 minute crash course on channel management – touching on key things about selling through resellers, from what it takes to lay the foundations for a successful reseller network to the latest technologies available for channel management.

Are your products channel ready?

Channel expert Ken Beam @ The VAR City brought in his 25 years of experience in Strategic Partnership Management and Development. Channel readiness quiz aside (assuming you passed it :)), Ken pointed out you need to really understand resellers and what motivates them, what business model they work on (a reseller on a 70/30 model, where 70% of revenue comes from services will obviously be interested in services opportunities).

Software Channel Survey Results - download now!

As you know, we’ve done a survey on how the crisis is impacting the channel distribution in the software industry. We’ve looked at the results and – although not statistically representative (survey conducted on the internet on a self-selected sample)-, they make an interesting reading, showing some trends and providing tips & solutions for channel challenges.

Frankly, I was (pleasantly) surprised to see how much weight both ISVs and resellers give to joint marketing programs, measuring, efficiency, communication…  obviously no one can afford to pay lip service to these actions, they are for real.

Encouragingly enough, vendors and resellers acknowledge the same top channel challenges and consider similar solutions for tackling problems.

A recession is a good time to sit back and analyze your go to market strategy and, part of this, to think about going international, online or through a reseller network. You may be already selling internationally in same language markets/through a few reseller partners – now is a good time to expand.

So why is it good to go international NOW?

• Spread risk (don’t put all eggs in one basket).
• Increase market base (there’s a variety of markets out there, from small to large software markets in both established and emerging economies. Not to mention that an increasing online population makes it easier than ever before to sell software online).
• Increase revenue.

Let’s dwell on this last point for a bit. When it comes to building a partner network, you need to start right about now to be fully up to speed when the recession is over and things start booming again. It doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t get anything out of your channel during the recession (that’s not a promise either), but in general you have to be ready to support it for at least 6 months without seeing much return.

A week and a bit ago I attended an Online chat about Twitter and micro-blogging with Bob Walsh. I was actually @ home with my two young children and had joined in late (there were transcripts provided after – very useful. Thanks, Neil).

While I was trying to catch up with what had been said and make sense of the conversation, I realized that no matter what the announced theme was, people taking part could find something interesting to say, share, comment, digress to other topics and overall enjoy the experience. 25 folks joining in an online conversation on a work-related issue and having a good time – this would be my summary of the whole thing.

No more than 20 questions :) and you will receive a full copy of the survey report.

I won’t lie to you: at the beginning of the month we had no intention of doing a survey on channel distribution in the software industry. Now we are.  More than that, we have put more and more effort into it as we were designing the questionnaire and it’s grown into this wonderful piece of research … It  became my baby project.

How has this all started? From a discussion about an ad we had to do for a reseller newsletter. We wanted to produce something different, not just a boring ad… but rather à la @Neil Davidson in his interruption marketing post. Well, we didn’t quite match Napoleon & the Hemorrhoids, nevertheless we did come up with something we believe is very useful and interesting to share with the world.

Avangate Oval Table

Last night I woke up at around 3 o’clock and I couldn’t go back to sleep. When I cannot sleep I usually think of work. What I have to do the next day, what I left pending the day before and so on.

Last night though I was thinking of our oval table (I’ll explain what that is), picturing a constant flux of people coming at the table, sitting down with a problem and leaving with a solution and a maybe a to do list.

In our office we have loads of meeting rooms: a biggish training room and various other meeting rooms, with/ without projectors/ conference phones/ even a couple of cozy ones for up to four people only.