Anne McClelland: Best Practices for XaaS Channel Optimization

How do you drive Technology-as-a-Service through the channel? That’s the question Anne McClelland is tackling as the VP of Research of a new TSIA practice, XaaS Channel Optimization.  If you haven’t heard of TSIA, the Technology Services Industry Association, they are on a mission to help technology companies leverage services to drive profitable growth. In […]

How do you drive Technology-as-a-Service through the channel? That’s the question Anne McClelland is tackling as the VP of Research of a new TSIA practice, XaaS Channel Optimization.  If you haven’t heard of TSIA, the Technology Services Industry Association, they are on a mission to help technology companies leverage services to drive profitable growth. In this episode I chat with Anne about how she’s building this new channel practice and the wide range of channel questions she will help XaaS (anything-as-a-service) vendors answer. Learn how you can optimize your XaaS channel based on the LAER sales model in this engaging conversation with a channel veteran. 

When it comes to selling and delivering anything-as-a-service, we’re all facing the same channel questions; What should our channel strategy look like? What partners do we need and what do we need them to do? How do we motivate them? Three common questions that Anne gets from vendors and will be answering through her research are:

How do you the transformation from on-prem to as-a-service without disrupting your channel?
How do you start involving what you need to deliver as a vendor and not conflict with your channel partners and the things that they’re already doing?
How do you convince the channel to move off the perpetual model? What are some of the incentives that you can put in place to move them from the old way of doing business into this new way?

Where to Start

As you’re thinking about these new as-a-service offerings, you can’t just take your old channel strategy and simply bolt on new chapters to make it fit the new offering set and the new go to market. Take a clean sheet of paper, retreat, and really think about what is it that you are trying to accomplish with these new offerings and what roles you as a technology vendor are going to play.

TSIA has a very effective sales model for this exercise called LAER, which stands for Land, Adopt, Expand and Renew. Optimizing your channel involves determining what role you play as the vendor and what role your partners will play in each of these four stages to capture the market and deliver an awesome customer experience. Decide what you are going to provide as differentiation and what you need partners to do to complement what you’re doing and help the customers really receive business value.

As you're thinking about these new offerings, you can't assume you can take the old channel strategy and do add-ons to make it fit the new offering set and the new go to market. @annmccle
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Vendors need to think across land, adopt, expand, and renew, and decide what they are going to provide and what they need partners to do to help the customers really receive their value.
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You've got to build systems that allow your partners to have secure access to customer utilization data. They need to know where it has and hasn't been adopted so they can continue to drive that adoption. @annmccle
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LINKS & RESOURCES

Connect with Anne on LinkedIn
Learn more about the new TSIA XaaS Channel Optimization practice
Get a copy of the Technology-as-a-Service Playbook and other TSIA books
Hear Jay McBain talk about the explosion in channel automation
The post Anne McClelland: Best Practices for XaaS Channel Optimization first appeared on Channel Journeys.