Shrinking Degrees of Separation

LinkedIn claims 14 million subscribers and over 581 thousand of them are within three degrees of me! Who are all these people?

While I haven't figured out how to unleash the full value of my LinkedIn network, I'm impressed with the social networking concept and the small world phenomenon on which it's built.

Case in point -- if I want to find people that are working in a channel or partner marketing role, I merely type in the term and, within seconds, I have a list of over 500 users in my network that match that criteria. Pretty cool. Unfortunately, what I don't know -- unless I crawl through the profile of each person -- is what that person did as a channel or partner marketing professional. While I suppose you could make a case that any job with the term "marketing" in it lends itself to amorphous interpretation, there's something about adding the word "channel" or "partner" that makes the job of finding candidates particularly confounding.

As channel specialists, we receive several requests each month from people asking for job descriptions or for referrals to channel and partner marketing professionals. What's tricky, however, is identifying what specific function the company wants this candidate to perform so we can provide suitable tools and referrals. In other words, we need more than degrees of separation to help companies find the right candidate and to minimize their time spent searching.

What we have learned is that the job of managing channels and partners can largely be broken down into five distinct functions:

1) Channel Strategy & Program Development
This is a relatively senior role, working with the company's business units or product groups to determine which channels will best reach which markets (and how to engage those channels to do so). It's a crucial job: helping the company package its channel business proposition(s) and engaging with product marketing to prepare products/services for channels. This role requires strong channel knowledge along with research and strategic thinking skills.

2) Channel Marketing
A decidedly outward-facing role, this job requires demand generation & field program development skills. Channel marketing people tend to travel a lot. They work with their sales counterparts to build and execute partner marketing plans in line with the company's product roadmap and objectives.

3) Channel Communications
Depending on the company, this function may reside in the channels group, or be part of marketing communications. It doesn't matter where it resides as long as it's someone's job. This function is all about consistent, high-value partner communications, be it newsletters, website, conferences, or forums.

4) Channel Operations
You guessed it -- this is where terms and conditions, pricing exceptions, incentive programs and other operational minutia are managed.

5) Channel Sales or Management
As opposed to end user sales, the mature channel salesperson focuses more on the partner relationship than on the quarterly target. The successful candidate is an "orchestrator of resources" which are brought together to help the partner grow its share of the company's sales. Further, there may be different functions within the channel sales team, such as partner recruitment or enablement.

The size of the company, product complexity, and breadth of partner operations ultimately determine the degree to which you can specialize, but it's important to recognize that one person cannot typically deliver all of these functions well. The more precise you are in your channel job description about what you need, the better the results, and the happier the newly recruited employee will be.

May your personal network continue to grow and flourish, and may you save time in finding the right fit channel candidates to keep you ahead of the curve.