3 Critical Questions CFOs Should Ask About Channel Sales
The role of today’s CFO is evolving. Once upon a time, CFOs and budget managers were tasked with preserving the assets of an organization by minimizing risk, getting the books right, and running a tight financial ship efficiently and effectively.
In today’s fast-changing digital workplace, CFO’s increasingly play a more diverse role as strategic decision maker, responsible for leveraging data to shape overall business strategy and direction, often under increased pressure to cut costs and grow revenue.
What does this mean for CFOs who helm finance departments in the channel sales environment?
Critical channel sales questions
Today’s modern CFO has the opportunity to be more streamlined, collaborative, and most importantly, accurate. To do that, there are three key questions a CFO needs answer about channel selling activity:
- What is the forecasted revenue contribution from channel sales this month/quarter?
- Are my marketing expenditures generating a return?
- How do we increase revenue from existing partners?
But the channel sales space presents hurdles — communication and visibility, chief among them — that make providing answers to these questions inherently difficult.
In traditional manufacturer/channel partner relationships, forecasting, for example, is nearly impossible to predict with significant accuracy and timeliness. And what good is forecasting data if it’s unreliable or revealed too late to be relevant?
Outside the four walls
Obtaining up-to-date and accurate information about quarterly sales performance, opportunities for cost savings, or where to make additional investments is problematic because so much sales activity take place outside the four walls of the company.
Once a sales lead leaves the building and is handed over to a channel partner, it becomes difficult to track as it moves through the funnel. This “dark hole” severely limits the ability to forecast or track deals. And without a unified view of performance, including conversion metrics, across your distributor network your ability to respond to changes, make investments, or chart a new course — in essence operate with any agility — suffers.
A unified channel revenue view
The key to better visibility — whether you’re looking for ways to streamline costs, determine ROI on your marketing spend per lead, or want the ability to budget more accurately — is a single, unified platform. This unified view is the most comprehensive way to understand, manage, and improve the channel sales process, and also offer business-critical insights important to successful CFOs, such as:
- Real-time revenue visibility and pipeline reporting
- The ability to track performance metrics on marketing programs relative to lead conversion rates
- Channel Partner performance over time
The ability to understand, manage, and improve the channel sales process are essential to optimizing the entire operation and seeing improved results.
To learn more about LeadMethod’s performance tracking and forecasting capabilities, schedule a live demo.
