What is the Channel?

I spend a lot of time on local soccer fields with teenagers. It’s one of the ways I try to stay young. There are many moments where this ‘fountain of youth’ comes back to haunt me and makes me realize that we just don’t see the world in the same way. A couple of weeks back I had a very odd experience that made me realize just how old I’d gotten.

I was coaching a team of 17 year olds who were one of the top teams in the region. This team has had a lot of success, but they’d just gone through a losing streak and we were trying to turn it around. As with any successful sports team, long-term success sometimes has the ability to implode on itself by a lack of focus. Players, and teams of players, often start to feel like all they have to do is ‘show up’ and they’ll win. It’s a difficult thing to keep them focused on playing with an edge. My real concern about this team was that they’d lost their ‘bite.’

One day after a lackluster practice, I turned to the group and said, “You guys are a bunch of prima donnas and you’ve got to play like you have something to prove every time you step on the pitch.” And, I walked off the field leaving them to chat amongst themselves.

Prima donna is defined as, “A very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance.”

In speaking to one of the players later on about the conversation I found out that their understanding of this accusation was, “You guys are a bunch of pre-Madonnas and you’ve got to stop playing football like a bunch of aging female rockers…” Followed by, “And, why were you referring to Madonna anyway, you know that none of us listen to music from your era…right, let alone HER?”

Yeah…prima donna (diva) and Pre-Madonna (music before Madonna), are two very different things.

Channel is a word that’s a lot like this. When folks start working in technology companies, their understanding of the channel is:

• The bed of a stream

• A straight or a narrow sea

• A band of frequencies used in radio and television

• A passage (as a tube) through which something flows

Technology companies (and others in distribution) define channel as something very different. They’ve adapted our point #4 to something very useful to understand a real sales process.

A technology channel, or ‘the channel’ refers to a network of technology partners selling the products and services on behalf of any technology manufacturer or vendor. Wikipedia defines channel in this way: “A channel partner is a company that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market and sell the manufacturer’s products, services, or technologies. This is usually done through a co-branding relationship. Channel partners may be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, systems integrators (SI), technology deployment consultancies, and value-added resellers (VARs) and other such organizations.” And I would add that it’s soon to be expanded to SP’s or services providers (cloud, managed, technology, etc.)

The next time that someone tells you that you are a prima donna, make sure that you understand whether they are calling you a rock star or a diva (or both). The next time that someone mentions their ‘channel’ make sure you understand if they are talking about their favorite TV station, the local sea, or the way they plan to bring their new technology to ‘the masses.’ bChannels specializes in working in the technology channel, not the TV or the sea, and we are neither prima donnas or Pre-Madonna.

#OpinionPiece