Making the Art of Deal Reg Simpler
It’s hard to imagine a credible channel program that doesn’t include a deal reg component. Partners need to receive compensation for their efforts in the event a deal winds up being stolen out from under them. Either by a direct sales team or a rival partner. The cost of sales associated with selling any solution today is considerable. Most partners are not going to allocate the resources required to close a complex sale unless they are sure they can recoup the time and effort they put into setting up the deal in the first place.
A deal registration program provides partners with a guarantee of double-digit margins to compensate them for their efforts.
Like most things in the channel that’s a lot easier to say than accomplish. During a recent Channel Mechanics webinar on Channel Automation, the top two challenges as cited by channel managers were; managing conflict and measuring effectiveness. You can watch the webinar here. In fact, it’s easy to see how a poorly managed deal registration process could wind up having an adverse impact on quarterly results.
Eliminate Deal Reg Confusion
The first order of business to eliminate any deal registration confusion is to implement a formal request for the approval process. But that’s just the first step. Channel managers also need to provide a mechanism for; registering deals, routing approval requests, determining eligibility, determining compensation, and, most importantly, setting limits on how long the registration is valid.
Of course, the most significant business benefit of providing a deal reg program is increased visibility into the sales pipeline.
Achieving that visibility requires business intelligence tools that provide actionable insights into the status of potentially thousands of deals. Armed with that data channel managers can then determine what incentives they might want to offer to help accelerate the closing of some sales before the quarter ends.
Mechanics designed our approach to channel automation to make it simple to manage a deal registration process within the context of a more significant lead generation program. We crafted the RegisterIT deal reg module within a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application to make it possible to create customized deal registration request forms as part of a straightforward workflow process. There’s even a suite of reports to manage requests and approvals as well as continuously monitoring performance.
There’s a direct correlation between having a deal registration program and partner loyalty.
Channel partners trust IT vendors that are willing back warm promises of love and support with cold hard cash. Most channel partners today are not going to seriously participate in a channel that doesn’t include a deal registration program.
An excellent way to measure whether a deal registration program is useful is to keep track of the percentage of partners actively registering deals. If they are not participating, chances are good a rival has a more attractive program in place.
Our Deal Reg software gives you the capability to design, launch, manage and measure deal registration programs, in real time.