Too often channel strategies ranging from the most tactical and short-term to the most strategic and multi-year fail.  Success or failure of a channel management strategy has nothing to do with the time horizon; it does however have everything to do with perspective, timing, and getting away from a “one and done” mentality in so many companies today.  A channel management strategy is never done – it is an iterative process that too many sales, operations, service and marketing managers ignore instead of own – the “fix it” mentality is so pervasive that there are a few channel management software vendors surviving because they are doing the work of sales, marketing and operations.

When channel strategies implode it’s too easy for companies to say that the business model changed and the channel strategies didn’t keep up, or their channel partners rejected strategies because competitors were offering more margin, dollars, or attention.  Those are all cop-outs and speak to symptoms rather than causes.

Worst practices in channel management gets started when these factors begin surfacing, and get perpetuated by a perspective of companies thinking they can buy their way out of these problems.  In fact spending just forestalls the pain:

• “One and done” mentality about lead management, order capture and service. I’ve seen high tech manufacturers in industries known from cut-throat pricing let their managers, directors and even VPs sit behind their desks all day right after putting a channel management system in place.  Sure, the sales force was worked with to begin with to get their feedback – but now that the system is in and launched – these organizations tend to breathe a collective sigh of relief and settle back in their comfort zones which often includes ignoring rather than serving Sales.  So organizational life goes on before – except there is now a $1M plus system in place for serving the channel and the sales force – and the people who were so passionate about it are now on to another project, or worse, their work lives before the system went in.  Nothing changed really; there is a “done” mentality pervading these manufacturers, and while usage rates hover less than 30% or less no one has the time or economic incentive (read bonuses) to make things changes for the better.

• “The Sales Number You Called Has Been Disconnected…” Ironically the manufacturers who do have initial success with channel strategies take their best managers, directors and VPs turn them into firefighters first, long-term business process owners second.  A top director at one manufacturer spearheaded a successful pricing program for indirect channels that included streamlining special pricing requests.  The system had major integration challenges with SAP and Oracle ERP instances, and this high achieving Director worked diligently with channel management, system integration and IT managers to solve the problem – and the result was a system that ran flawless.  The trouble was that this Marketing Director was so strong at organizing the system; time spent staying in touch with Sales suffered.  The result: the most effective Director in the company lost touch with Sales’ needs.

• Lack of integration expertise. With the pipeline for channel management deals slowing down at the beginning of this year there is a tendency of most struggling channel management vendors overstating their ability to handle integration.  Don’t just check the references vendors you’re qualifying give you; go find the references they don’t want you to know about – their failures will teach you much more than their successes.  One manufacturer recently did this and found that error messages – while promised to be in customers’ specific format – weren’t in over a year.  That bumped the vendor down three levels in the short list.

• Beware of vendors waiting for the M & A Train. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that there are going to be easily over forty different mergers and acquisitions throughout all of enterprise software, and at least three that will re-align CRM overall and channel management specifically.

• Channel Strategies Must Rock The W2s Of Users. When it’s all said and done, one VP of Sales just nailed it with the comment “So what will these channel strategies do to my W2?” The combination of streamlining manual processes and automating them to make more sales happen must reverberate and rock the W2s of the sales people that depend on them.  You may argue that channel strategies are just giving sales, operations and service the tools to do what they are already paid to do – but anyone involved with sales, marketing and channels is dollar driven – and W2s are how these people keep score.  Want to win with your channel strategies?  Then rock the W2s of the channel members you serve.  That is critical.

Bottom Line: This year there is going to be more manufacturers becoming channel driven than ever before.  In previous years the U.S. Department of Commerce has said that 70% of all revenue in distribution will come from indirect channels.  That has held constant in the last three years, and more manufacturers have failed than succeeded trying to tap into that potential revenue stream.  Consider why companies have failed and plan accordingly, but be sure to always ask “How does this grow the W2s of the people who will use this system every day?” and then you can sell with confidence to the most deal-savvy of Sales VPs out there.

It’s time to get more coordinated with your channels than ever before, because collaboration is a competitive strength that you can’t afford to lose during this recession.  Here are ten strategies for fighting this recession with your channels – because no one is coming out of these hard times without building some exceptionally strong relationships.  Let’s get the illusion out of the way that any manufacturer – or company for that matter - can get through this recession completely on their own.

Here are ten strategies for surviving this recession with your channels:

• Get your channel partners to have skin in the game and re-engaged. Now is the time to get your channel partners refocused on the goals you both share, and consider re-evaluating the shared goals to make them attainable by your working together.  Channel partners need to have skin in the game like never before.

• Face time is key today. Get out and spend time with each reseller, channel partner, retailer and distributor to see what they need.

• Buzz for new products needs to start with your channels. Instead of being focused on how you can generate buzz through massive marketing spending, start by getting your channel partners into the launch of new products well before the actual launch date by asking for and acting on their feedback.

• Don’t give pricing concessions, give co-op instead. Don’t resort to price discounting to just keep your channel partners focused.  Go after more spending between both you and your channel partners by increasing co-op spending and use Market Development Funds (MDF) to protect key channels.

• Create new opportunities for growth by looking at new vertical markets. In the last recession the best defense that many channel partners pursued was finding a niche of being strong in a given vertical market.  That’s critical in this downturn as well – help your channel partners find that vertical strength.

• Get Special Pricing Requests automated. Get away from having your channel partners wait to get special pricing on deals approved; automate this process and you’ll be able to win more deals as a result.

• Accelerate new product introductions into the first half of the year. Competing by re-defining product generations in their industries is going to be one of the most pervasive competitive strategies in 2009.

• Make sales and product configuration pay. Get your channels onboard with sales and product configuration strategies and use these applications as the basis for giving your channels and opportunity to sell more.  Get new products launched quickly through product and selling configuration strategies to further differentiate.

• Escalate sales leads through channel collaboration systems, not manually. Getting sales leads to channel partners and quickly escalating them to the best possible reseller is also critical right now.  Get out and spend time with resellers specifically on this issue to make sure you know what they need in this area – and walk through the best approach you can serve them with leads.

• Get a Dealer Advisory Council created now, even if it is held online and through WebEx, to get insights into your channel partners’ unmet needs. You can go big on this and hold an offsite or you can do it virtually – but either way you need to get your channel partners’ unmet needs captured and concentrate on how to collaborate with them more closely than ever before.

Bottom line: Consider these ten channel strategies for making your relationships with channel partners stronger, more resilient, more profitable today.

One of the major challenges to deploying a quote-to-order solution for complex manufacturers is the ability to integrate the solution within the current existing environment. Cincom’s Enterprise Integration for Complex Manufacturers addresses that significant challenge with clear, seamless integration and usability. The existing Enterprise landscape can be vastly improved with the right quote-to-order solution and a product configuration, allowing you to achieve increased quote management, product and configuration management capabilities and configuration functionality.

A Quote-to-Order solution with Enterprise Integration for Complex Manufacturers integrated within is designed to complement your CAD/PDM/PLM/ERP and CRM applications with built-in extensions that allow easy and swift integration into your other line of business systems.

Cincom Enterprise Integration for Complex Manufacturers provides unequalled support for industry-standard interfaces from within modeling tools:

Web Services
ODBC/JDBC
XML
COM
ActiveX
AJAX
A single model can be deployed in multiple environments
Web
Mobile
Plug-in (embedded application)
Back-end Asynchronous Transaction Server
Data mapping tools to simplify creation and maintenance of interfaces
Integration with desktop applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel
Pre-packaged integration accelerators for enterprise applications like SAP

In the complex manufacturing environment, there is no such thing as a a cookie-cutter customer equipment order. A true product configuration system has to be able to integrate with numerous systems and databases as well as application tools in order to accurately and efficiently scope customer equipment orders. The ability to interface our product configurators with the use of the right Enterprise Integration tool ensures the continued ability to draw upon the foundation of underlying applications and knowledge while continuing to play a key role in the specification and design of equipment. The existing resources are leveraged appropriately and do not need to be re-invented.

There’s an undercurrent that’s starting to tug at even the best manufacturer and distribution channel relationships.  It’s the ability to set and manage expectations based on supply chain visibility. and share that critical data with channel partners.  Distributors, dealers and channel partners don’t call it that, they call it vendor responsiveness when it happens, and being blown off when it doesn’t.

The ironic aspect of this topic is that while many manufacturers insist they have the ability to make and keep commitments based on visibility into multiple layers of their supply chains, their dealers and distributors report just the opposite.

Supply Chains and The Domino Effect

Visiting with auto dealers to gauge if Available-To-Promise (ATP) and Capable-To-Promise (CTP) were important to them on fleet sales proved positive: these dealers only order from manufacturers that can deliver ATP and execute to the date.  So fundamental but so true; dealers only trust manufacturers that have supply chains in focus, making and keeping commitments based on solid knowledge of their supply chains, production scheduling and order fulfillment.

When these dealers sell fleet vehicles, mostly to small and medium businesses to either replace or grow their own fleets, the ATP date from the manufacturer is the same date often a small business gets to expand and grow.  The Domino Effect, if you will, of an accurate ATP date means the small business now has additional revenue generating assets on the road – a critical link to their future growth.

Conversely not delivering to an ATP date kills the pipeline of new revenue the small business was betting on and forces them to repair damaged trust with their customers.  This Domino Effect of commitments in fleet sales has a lasting effect.  One manufacturer wedged into a tight rural market by having superior knowledge of and control over their ATP dates versus entrenched competitors.  The result: 30% of sales are with the new manufacturer, from offshore, due to better supply chain visibility.

Don’t be Afraid To Tell The Emperor He has No Clothes

For manufacturers that are getting beat in these fleet sales channels, the disconnect between corporate and the field is noticeable and significant.  C-level executives, insulated from the channels by consultants and system integrators that profit more when the world outside is seen as in OK shape but internal systems need massive re-working, are hesitant to tell the CEO that basically the emperor has no clothes.  Not wanting to tell them their channels are in complete disarray – or worse not knowing it – costs the companies millions in lost opportunity.  All because no one has the courage to say that for all the internal system spending the fundamental systems that matter to channels and customers are broken and need fixing now.

When the auto industry’s  C-level executives are told about how badly broken their supply chains really are, say “Our business model doesn’t require use to deliver Available-To-Promise…” and that the supply chain is not important to their channels.  In those words is the unraveling of a channel strategy and the drop-off of channel selling on the part of these challenged manufacturers.

The reality is that for every manufacturer that relies on channels that ignores providing supply chain visibility on especially complex manufactured products, the greater probability their competitors are.  So it’s the choice of each manufacturer, but given how small businesses purchasing fleet vehicles to grow their own businesses key off of ATP and other commitments from channel partners, manufacturers need to realize that by enriching the channel they are enriching their customers – and that being myopic and falsely secure in corporate, away from the channels, is an illusion.  The reality is in the channels.

Time To Make Your Channels Stronger

It used to be just a matter of margins and Market Development Funds or MDF for short, to keep a distributor, dealer or channel partner satisfied and selling your products.  No more.  Competitors want your channels and will deliver advanced systems that give dealer reps the assurance that ATP, CTP and other indicators of delivery dates from your supply chain are real, and can be counted on.

Bottom Line: If you have invested in delivering this to your channels, great.  You just made a massive debit in your credibility account with your channels.  If you’re ignoring it, go visit your lowest performing dealers and see how many of your competitors’ products are selling there and why.  Chances are it’s because the dealers have learned to trust an emerging competitor’s visibility into their supply chains and have the track record of making and keeping commitments to prove it.

The surest path during a recession is to invest in and even overcompensate in making those strategies, processes and systems that directly interact with and enable conversations with customers as efficient and streamlined as possible.  Given the choice between spending a dollar on increasing customer loyalty by making your company easier to do business with versus not doing anything, it’s clearly better to err on the side of earning customer loyalty using analytics.

Analytics are often used in customer service and service management departments for resource planning and forecasting, managing the service management system to optimal levels, also for defining schedule and route optimization, in addition to Fleet Management. All of these strategies for using analytics lead to exceptional internal efficiencies – but let’s face it – this economy has sent a very loud and clear signal – it’s a very critical time to keep the customers you have and gain new ones through exceptional, over-the-top service. Using analytics to lock down customer loyalty is possible, profitable and a strategy forward-looking company in a broad range of industries are pursuing today.

Consider the following key points about how analytics can be used to make service more customer-centered and capable of fulfilling the goal of locking down customer loyalty:

Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be exceeded during this recession – and analytics can tell you if you can or not. Instead of just “getting by” on the measures of performance you commit to customers on, go after the ones specifically in your SLAs and do an exceptional job on them.  When it comes time for contract and service renewals, your service strategies aimed at delivering exceptional performance can form the foundation of keeping the customer.

First time fix percentage needs to continually go up, even faster right now. Do you know what your first time fix performance is?  Get a hold of that figure and track it down and then begin to create a time series of it.  Chart it over time, work with your service department to figure out how to drive this figure up.  Consider it a leading indicator of customer loyalty.

Attack manual processes that cost you money and automate them over the Web instead – now. Consider the fact that your customers live in a 24/7 world, why force them into a 9 – 5 world that is further constrained by when your RMA Specialists are at their desk.  Automate the RMA process online.  QVC, HSN and other mass merchandisers who must make multichannel management work to survive are doing this today.  On the tech side specifically in the B2B arena, HP and IBM are masters of this as are dozens of component suppliers.

Get your service act together and create a dashboard to measure performance. Realize that service is the path to locking down customer loyalty in this recession.  Get a dashboard together and start measuring how youa re doing on a set of key measures of service performance.  Resolve to do whatever it takes to drive up these measures of performance – because they are measures of your ability to keep customers loyal.

Bottom line: Want to lock in the loyalty of your customers during this recession?  Use analytics to measure how you save them time and respect their unmet needs by trying to anticipate their needs with more targeted and efficient services strategies.  When in doubt exceed their expectations on SLAs and measure – and celebrate that.  That’s where the future of any company’s viability is.

Initial marketing budgets for 2009 have already been completed in nearly all companies, and according to surveys of these budgets, industry after industry is showing a flat-lining or reduction in marketing and channel programs spending.  Many of the industry and national press covering these surveys serve them up with a healthy dose of pessimism and gloom-and-doom, and it can be downright depressing if you just limit your world view to this instead of spending face time with your channel during this critical time.

Instead of just letting your perspective of this economic downturn by jaded by the continual stream of negativity that paradoxically seems to drive up viewers and readership, challenge yourself to get out with your distributors, resellers, dealers and large direct accounts and go on sales calls with them, listen to their complaints, and look for ways to serve them.

Here are a few ideas on how to survive this recession while strengthening you channels:

1. Now is the perfect time to turn your competitor’s weaknesses into your strengths. Canon dominates high-end camera sales channels today because they took the time to thoroughly understand the needs of channel partners in their industry and deliberately set out to surpass their competitors’ lack of support for sales reporting, pricing exception management and new product launch execution.  Canon sent nearly a dozen managers to distributors, retailers, dealers and service centers to understand how this channel worked.  After months of interviews the team got back together, planned their channel strategy and promptly took channel share from competitors.  Now is a great time to do this in your industry as well.
2. Use any slow time to transform your company into being truly customer-centric. Now I am not talking about the CEOs who get on CNBC and talk about how “customer centric” their companies are when they are in fact more self-serving with their procedures, pricing strategies and product lifecycle decisions.  No, this is where a company completely re-defines and re-orients their processes, procedures, systems, roles of critical people in their organization, aligning them all to be focused on being more transparent to customers.  A big difference in saying a sound bite on CNBC versus doing extensive process redefinition, yet companies who make this commitment now stand a better chance of surviving.
3. Give your channel partners a seat at the product and strategy development table. Creating Channel Advisory Councils is a great use of time today, focusing on getting your senior management together with your channel’s senior management teams. One manufacturer did this and invited an expert in supply chain management and Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and area that was making order rates drop due to inefficiencies.  During the advisory council the VMI issues were closer to being solved and within ninety days of the Council meeting they were solved.  Getting face time with channel partners’ senior management turned out to be the turning point in resolving long-standing VMI problems.
4. Always be looking to create service champions, even throughout your channel partners. The more companies I’ve talked to and visited the more you can see the slowdown in the faces of everyone; sometimes it looks like people have just given up.  Fight back against this fatalistic attitude by celebrating exceptional service.  Hold company meetings and give out awards for exceptional service, presenting a $100 American Express Gift Certificate is a nice touch. It’s so sad to see economic fatalism kill some people’s careers by letting them slip into not caring anymore.  Go out and resolve to celebrate exceptional service now in both your own organization and your channels’ organizations as well.  This is not a “rah rah” kind of motivation by the way, it is saying “thank you!” to the people who still care and extend themselves to excel in their jobs despite the economic downturn.  These people deserve to be celebrated.

Bottom line: Everyone is struggling, go after those pain points of your channel partners, solve them and strengthen your own company at the same time.

The catalyst of any successful customer experience is trust.  Earning trust from customers takes a consistent, passionate level of commitment to delivering customer experiences above expectations.  Keeping and growing that trust with a customer, whether it is in B2B- or B2C-based industries, is difficult yet attainable even during a recession.

No One Ever Cost-Reduced Their Way to Customer Loyalty

Many companies are cutting drastically back on the very staff they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences, while others are reinvigorating, redirecting their staffs to concentrate on delivering over-the-top service that far surpasses customer expectations. These latter companies are using the recession as a galvanizing force in their companies to focus everyone on keeping their existing customers and winning new ones with exceptional, excellent service. Companies who see the recession as a rallying point to passionately serve their customers more responsively, completely and with greater focus than ever before are staying financially viable today.  No one ever cost reduced their way into exceptional customer experiences.  Instead it takes a new perspective, the focus on using these difficult economic times as a reason to show customers why their trust is warranted, valued and respected.

Thawing B2B Spending With Over-the-Top Service and Concern

During a recession B2B marketers face the daunting task of keeping the key decision makers in their top accounts from freezing in fear or panic and not spending or doing anything.  What’s needed is for B2B companies to extend their expertise, even for no charge, and go into their key accounts and work to help them overcome their biggest problems today.  Retention strategies like this in tough times don’t lead to immediate sales.  They do send a powerful message that any B2B marketer doing this is in their clients’ corner for the long-run. Retention strategies often unearth other areas of the company that can use existing solutions in place, already sold.  Helping B2B customers get more value during these times is a brilliant strategy to stay relevant to them during this recession.

The Only Security Is Exceeding Customer Expectations Daily

In better economic times, companies will often define mutually agreed-upon benchmarks and then put bonus incentives and salary raise multipliers in place if the expectations are exceeded.  This sends a powerful message through any B2B-based organization, and that is do whatever it takes to get performance consistently above the B2B customers’ target levels of performance.

Now the galvanizing force has to be not only these metrics but the fact that both the B2B marketers’ and their customers’ viability is on the line.  For B2B marketers, its’ time to fight for your customers by pitching in to solve their problems even if it doesn’t lead to immediate increased sales.

All B2B marketers aspire to be trusted advisors; the ones that gain this level of confidence with customers have done the hard work of making sure their entire organizations back up strategies, plans and tactics that consistently deliver experiences that surpass customers’ expectations.

Strengthen Your Serve With Knowledge

To learn more about how customer experiences can be improved from both a B2B and B2C standpoint, begin by subscribing to Paul Greenberg’s blog, as Paul is an excellent and entertaining author and speaker, and is founder of the Line56 Group. His blog entry on December 6th specifically focuses on customer experience in recessionary times.  I also recommend subscribing and regularly reading David Meerman Scott’s blog WebInkNow.com and one of the best books I’ve read all year on the subject, Tuned In, by Craig Stull, Phil Meyers and David Meerman Scott. There is also the excellent book, Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers Into Advocates by Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler.  I also read Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research’s blog, Customer Experience Matters, in addition to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing Blog and Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog.  There is much being written today about the impact of social networking on the customer experience.  Dr. Andrew MacAfee has a blog that is excellent in this area and the broader issue of Enterprise 2.0’s impact on customer centricity in organizations, and Ross Dawson’s Trends in the Living Networks.  Finally I subscribe to Harvard Business School Knowledge Blog and the blogs of analyst and advisory firms active in this area as well.

Regardless what’s going on in the broader economy, you still have significant control over your own channel relationships.  You can still make them stronger and more capable of delivering results.

Even in the most commoditized industries including high tech distribution where resellers and channel partners are loyal to the distributor with the lowest price, there is room for improving the service your company delivers to channel partners.  Consider the fact that there are many services companies and a manufacturer expanding their distribution channels right now – in the midst of the nearly daily onslaught of bad news – and one realizes that a company’s reaction to these broader economic factors is much more important than the factors themselves. Instead of letting the daily litany of bad news paralyze your company for investing in and making your channels more aggressive, focused and passionate about getting to shared goals, consider taking the following steps:

• Take a hard look at pricing workflows in general and how you can automate special pricing requests (SPRs) specifically. This is an area two high tech distributors were able to automate for their resellers, netting average gains of nearly 80% (AMR Research).  Typically distributors and manufacturers who offer SPRs on sales deals staff this area with only Sales Operations Managers, many of which ending up working 80 – 100 hour weeks this time of the year to keep up with all the SPRs.  Automating this not only saves these valuable employees an all-nighter or two at the end of your fiscal year, it also means you’ll be able to respond that much faster to pricing requests and win business.

• Use Team Selling To Tackle Sales Opportunities.  Instead of pointing fingers about whose fault it is why there aren’t enough sales in this last quarter of the year start gang-tackling sales opportunities and consider using Web-based team selling applications that give you the opportunity to collaborate between dealers, distributors and your sales management. Many customers, especially in commercial accounts, are changing their purchasing priorities.  Time to get in front of them with a sales team and figure out what really matters to them right now.

• Face time is the best investment there is with your top 20% of distributors and dealers right now. So much has been written about automating the sales process, including Web-based applications to serve each specific segment of your distribution channel as well.  Automating service responses to the lower 80% of the channel is a great way to save on costs, while freeing up your best direct sales reps to work with the top 20% of accounts.  Want a hedge against the broader economic factors in play right now? Get your best sales reps in front of your best distributors and work very hard at understanding their business better than ever before.  The company’s were seeing gaining sales despite this economic downturn are those that see a direct link between face time with the top 20% of their customers and their attaining the role of trusted advisor in their products’ area of expertise.

• Be more passionate about serving your channel than any competitor. Your customers want to win. They want to get out of these broader economic times as much if not more than you and your company does.  If there is one thing any channel partner needs right now is the sense of their services and manufacturers they represent are in their corner, fighting for their success.  Want more mindshare in your top accounts?  Use Web-based collaborative tools to bring all the resources your company has to the problems your customers have is a great step in the right direction.  Use Web-based applications to free up your best salespeople to invest valuable face time with your most profitable customers – as your competitors no doubt are also targeting these accounts with a greater intensity than ever before.

Time to get passionate delivering exceptional service to your customers, including automating Special Pricing Requests and developing entirely new approaches to using Web-based collaborative and team selling applications.  Automate serve to the lower 80-% of your channels and get face time with the top 20%.

Bottom Line: It’s all about earning the chance to serve again and being a trusted advisor; using Web-based apps to accomplish this goal can be done, now.

How to Measure Quote-to-Order Results:

In order to properly quantify the savings and gains that your company realizes through a Quote-To-Order system implementation, you have to do some serious benchmarking ahead of time. Too many companies wait until after they have implemented a QtO strategy before they really keep track of the increases in cross sells and up sells, quote to order time savings and cycle time reductions. When you wait until after to crunch your numbers, chances are that your CFO won’t see a calculable difference in returns simply because there was no benchmark in the first place.

Depending on the extent of manual system changeover to an automated QtO system, you company can see results such as a 60% decrease in order cycle time, a huge jump in quote creation time and accuracy that also results in a massive reduction in incorrect orders.

The question is, how can you know the percentage of gains and savings if you don’t know what your numbers are now, before your Quote to Order system implementation or upgrade?

You can begin defining your measurements of QtO processing by looking at the performance of your company in key metrics. Go through your entire Quote to Order process, department by department including sales, operations, manufacturing, service, customer service and development. Talk to each department to find out what their greatest frustrations are in the process and see where the biggest lags and cost busters are.

Each measurement of efficiency and inefficiency will help you measure where your process is today and quantify your savings and gains later .

How long does it take to complete an order?
How often do orders require a re-work? What were the most common reasons?
Which parts of the process are redundant?

All of these elements are going to help you get a baseline measurement of your company’s QtO process.

The next twelve months is going to be pivotal not only from the economy’s standpoint but also from any given company’s ability to achieve their most critical customer-centric objectives as well. There is no time to be incremental in ones’ approach to achieving any goal in these difficult times.  It’s time to double-down on effort, vowing a level of intensity not seen in your company, in many cases, ever.

Sure, it’s painful right now in many companies.  But just letting this downturn happen and wreak its havoc is just not acceptable.  For customer-facing strategies to stand a chance of actually delivering on the promise of what they are designed for, you need to keep these points in mind:

Embarrass Your Company Into Accountability. One manufacturer now posts the percentage of their channel management projects completed, and the results achieved from them, on the front page of the Intranet site everyone sees every morning.  This company, a producer of Aerospace & Defense products, had struggled with accountability.  No more.  Project managers now openly compete with one another.

Require Marketing, Engineering and Senior Management to make at least three customer visits every ninety days. If you’ve been in channel marketing any length of time you can tell those on your team who know what both customers and channel partners want or don’t want.  You know those team members on your team who know unmet needs and those that think they know unmet needs.  There is a tremendous difference in these people.  Strive to turn your entire staff into the former; those that truly do know and understand customer unmet needs.  It costs airfare but it’s a worthy investment in customer retention, get in front of customers as often as possible to gain a better understanding of their needs versus competitors.

Use Customer Advisory Councils as a strategy for customer retention. It’s common sense that the companies that are going to emerge from this recession stronger are the ones doubling down on customer retention right now.  Getting to know the really tough problems their customers are creating strategies to help them out – even if it means selling nothing in the short term – are earning trust and respect right now.  No one writes about it because everyone involved is so busy solving customer problems. Make a point of getting your sales teams focused on these difficult problems and harnessing your best services teams to solve them.  This is the catalyst of a good customer retention program.

Second, get a Customer Advisory Council going – you can set one of these up for under $70K and given how hotels are hurting right now, you could even strike a better deal than that.  Get your top customers out for a week and get their feedback on new product ideas, get a thought leader involved and invite VP-level and above from your customers to the event.  Have your VPs and C-level execs do the invitations personally.  Turn it into a brainstorming session of how to excel in difficult times.

Bottom line: Time to go big or go home when to comes to fighting for your customers in these uncertain and troubling times.  Get focused on customer retention and advisory councils that can bring in the critical insights you need to create new enhancements to your channel management strategies – and this is the essence of truly fighting for a customer – being in their corner when times are tough like they are right now.