It’s no secret that buyers’ preferences and behaviors have changed and that there’s been an epic shift in the way businesses work together and with their networks of partners, resellers, dealers, and distributors. No matter how you slice it, removing friction and creating a seamless end-to-end experience across all moving parts is essential to delivering value throughout your channel and through to the customer.
Today’s channel relies on partner ecosystems converging around a single customer to deliver a more comprehensive solution and an exceptional integrated experience. Given recent economic changes, evolving buying journeys, the rise of subscription/consumption models, and new trifurcated channel programs – vendors of all shapes and sizes are rethinking the way they go to market.
But well-oiled ecosystems can be tricky. With today’s increasingly complex and sophisticated channel ecosystems, how do you get the most out of your combined players - partners, resellers, suppliers, providers and influencers - to drive more predictable business performance? Orchestration is your key to Optimization.
Considering the flywheel model there are multiple digital touchpoints throughout the buying journey which need to be orchestrated among partners. On average, there are 7 products as part of the technology solution. And, on average, there are 5 different partners involved in the customers’ buying journey. In order to keep up, B2B marketers are moving away from manual processes and towards incentives automation to scale their programs and fuel their go to market strategies. Ecosystem Orchestration can seamlessly unite all your channel incentive initiatives and processes and help you create synergies to aid performance optimization in a number of ways:
● Aligning business objectives so all players are working towards the same goals.
● Creating synergy across programs and methodologies to eliminate disjointed operations and teams.
● Enhancing performance by serving up the right programs in the right way to drive alignment, loyalty, and sales.
● Centralizing resources so all can access the information, tools, data, and support needed – and indeed share relevant content - to maximize engagement and productivity.
● Ensuring a seamless experience for everyone using the channel ecosystem.
As James Hodgkinson, VP of 360 Channel Ecosystems, explains “EO in the channel can provide a dedicated, “single-pane-of-glass” platform of fully automated, intuitive tools that work together to improve the quality of partnerships and maximize performance to enable brands to masterfully orchestrate their channel incentives program for maximum ROI”.