Who drives using just the rear view mirror?

There’s a phrase we have at bChannels for how most vendors like to organise and run their channel. We call it “looking out the rear view mirror”. The practice refers to focusing solely on historical (usually sales) data that vendors have at their disposal in order to decide who receives most benefit, time and attention. Here’s the bad news. Whilst knowing what’s going on behind is important, if you’re not looking out the front you’re in danger of missing something that your survival might just depend on. There’s a reason the windshield is large by comparison.

But why do vendors not take more notice? Well, most likely because that’s the way they’ve always done it. Yet money and resources invested in this way are merely protecting their interest in partners who are already loyal in order not to lose share. OK, there’s merit in that. But it doesn’t deliver on where the real growth might come from. Spending time looking our front on what’s happening, where you are going, how fast and how others are moving in relation to you paints a more comprehensive, more powerful picture.

Vendors need to get to grips with how to manage a much more complex data flow. There’s all the data points a vendor has at their disposal but that are rarely looked at – together. Look at who invests their marketing dollars and what they give back- who’s really using that money to gain incremental business and attract new customers? Look at how they invest in skills and certifications – are they growing or shrinking their skills? Put that together with sales performance and you learn a lot more. But you’re still focused on ‘historical’ performance.

Then there’s outside the vendor’s own data. Partners don’t do all their business with one vendor, you know! Take time to understand the context of your relationship in the partner’s world. Not their relationship in yours. If you figure out where they are investing and growing their skills, you might just understand why their sales are starting to go elsewhere before it’s too late. Even this is the tip of the iceberg. There’s a growing source of information from social media feeds. How does what a partner talks about affect their perception of you as a vendor? Can you spot trends in changing attitude and address them before they impact the relationship?

Putting all that data together enables vendors to get the all around view of what’s happening. Aggregating it, processing it and making sense of it takes a lot of time. And intelligence. That’s why we spend so much time at bChannels focused on partner data and what it tell us. It’s our lifeblood.

With more data than ever at our disposal, it’s time to stop spending so much time looking at what did happen and focus much on what is going to happen. Even what might happen. There’s a lot more to learn.

#OpinionPiece