Not all companies use stocking distributors. For example, many companies in the telecommunications, networking and software industries use value added resellers (VARs) to generate demand for their products and services and to act as an extension of their sales force. They also provide implementation and support services.
Industry-Specific Challenges
While these companies may not have the issues of dealing with channel POS and inventory, one tier channel management has its own unique challenges, which can be turned into competitive differentiators:
- Partner onboarding.
- Opportunity tracking via deal registrations.
- Managing marketing incentives such as MDF, co-op, volume incentive rebates or score-based rebates.
- Consolidated channel control dashboards and analytics with partner scorecards for complete channel insight.
- Complex sales credit assignments and commission splits based on arbitrary combinations of resellers, end customers, territories, product families etc.
