BIG CHANNEL BETS MAKING THE BIG BETS- FOR CHANNEL PARTNERS 1 Know thy customers: Learn their businesses, their vertical industries, the challenges they face to drive new business. Become operationally excellent and digitally competitive. 2 Become the trusted advisor to the line of business (LOB) buyer. Sell business outcomes, not technology. 3 4 5 Build practices-comprehensive suites of services that serve the customers' business needs. Specialize or build unique IP to create a differentiated value proposition for your customer. Create a network of partners to source and deliver a complete solution for your customers. MAKING THE BIG BETS- FOR VENDORS 1 Reward and incent the value a partner brings to a customer that influences sales of your product, recognizing your product actually may be provisioned through a cloud provider. 2 Recruit nontraditional business domain experts who sell to the LOB as new potential partners. 3 Position and differentiate your product in the vocabulary of business outcomes. 4 Invest in enabling P2P relationships. Cloud solutions, digital transformation, and IoT implementations require a complex set of skills, which will require a network of partners to deliver. 5 Create a compelling partner engagement journey to support partners through transition and to accelerate recurring revenue. 33 Q4 * 2017 | STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE