An uncertain forecast is a crisis waiting to happen.
Here’s how to fix it now.
If you’re managing a company selling through channel partners, odds are you’ve experienced these two challenges.
– You’ve closed a quarter below your forecast, though the pipeline looked alright at the beginning.
– You’ve launched a product and realized only a year later that the revenue isn’t where it needs to be.
Now, you may already be working to solve these as individual issues, isolated challenges to be tackled one by one, but the truth of the matter is that both are caused by the same thing: a lack of oversight in real time.
You’re seeing things that have already happened
What we mean by that is that many organizations lack insight into how their channel actually performs. Think about it. You probably receive reports at the end of a quarter, or a year, or long after a product has been launched. This means that everything you see has already happened, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
It has always been like this: you have real-time oversight of what your direct sales team does, while channel partners operate outside of your domain and provide reports, not of what they do but of what they have done.
Your forecast is an educated guess
The consequence is that your forecast is based on more or less educated guesses; a gut feeling, like raising a finger in the air to see which way the wind blows. The lack of oversight means that everything you base your forecast on is subjective: you have partners telling partner managers what they believe, and then these beliefs are turned into optimistic figures passed up the line.
It’s not because anyone is sloppy, or doesn’t care. It’s just that there has never been a better way to do it. In other words, it’s a systematic problem as opposed to a human one.
You see how your product performs after the fact
The same thing applies to your product launches. And of course it does: the success of your launch is decided by things you currently don’t have a way to oversee properly, like how well your partners are trained, who has the right information, who knows what. And by the time you realize that your partners haven’t been properly trained, that half of them didn’t even know about the launch and the other half has important questions that have never been answered, it is too late to change the outcome.
But there’s another way
You know that systematic problem we talked about? How it’s a fact, like death and taxes, that you can’t oversee partners the same way you can your direct teams? That’s what SP_CE fixes. PAM, the world’s first autonomous AI channel manager, makes sure all partners know everything they have to know – and by doing so she also shows you what they don’t know. Partners get everything they need, from information to training, while you get the kind of oversight that was previously reserved for direct sales. SP_CE even lets you keep track of all the deals partners are working on, so you know what happens when it happens and not afterwards.
What this means for the forecast and the launch
You probably know what this means already: suddenly, you can see things as they happen, and not at the end of the year. You’ll be able to see partner actions as they happen, and work to fix problems before they escalate. And just like that your forecast becomes more accurate, and you can go into another quarter with certainty, knowing you’ll see everything that happens when it happens, and not afterwards.
