For channel marketers, ensuring a strategic roadmap or blueprint is in place for their program can provide an overarching north star for identifying and measuring desired outcomes. Channel Fusion has leveraged 20 years of channel program delivery, optimization and measurement to create the Outcomes Blueprint, a tool to help ensure every client’s program aligns with a company’s north star.
The Channel Fusion Outcomes Blueprint starts with a defined process for gathering inputs related to a client’s channel program. These inputs are used to create a plan or roadmap to guide channel marketing efforts for a defined period of time. A key to the Outcomes Blueprint is its ability to support a client’s channel program in terms of being iterative, succinct and adaptable, while ensuring alignment with a broader company strategy – its north star!
No Hard Coding, No Stone Tablets
For many channel marketers, the strategic planning process can be cumbersome and inflexible. The Outcomes Blueprint process ensures companies have a channel program plan that isn’t hard-coded or etched in stone. Instead, the Outcomes Blueprint provides the ability for a company’s channel marketing team and partner, like Channel Fusion, to adjust to changing market and program conditions.
The Channel Fusion Outcomes Blueprint is utilized as part of the onboarding process for a new client as well as the expansion of an existing client’s channel program. Before the tactical implementation of a co-op or MDF program happens, for example, a strategic discussion takes place with key stakeholders on the client side as well as members of the Channel Fusion team.
This strategic discussion is part of the Blueprint Process, a five-step path to creating, delivering and measuring the Outcomes Blueprint:
- Discovery
- Document
- Alignment
- Delivery
- Outcomes
The Discovery phase of the Outcomes Blueprint process allows Channel Fusion and a client to establish a comprehensive understanding of what strategy, customer experience and return on investment outcomes the channel program elements will deliver for a particular brand. In addition, the facilitated Discovery meeting identifies anticipated challenges to accomplishing the strategy, customer experience and ROI outcomes.
The Document portion of the blueprint process captures and articulates a blueprint canvas that includes the strategy, customer experience and ROI outcomes that were identified during Discovery. In doing so, the path to achieving desired outcomes and how these efforts will be orchestrated across products and services are clearly documented. This includes ensuring strategies are being addressed tactically and channel program best practices are being applied throughout a program.
With the Document process complete, Channel Fusion and the client now have an Outcomes Blueprint that helps ensure alignment within a client’s organization. This is particularly important when additional stakeholders are introduced to a program or initiative. The blueprint also ensures alignment among the Channel Fusion team members that will be working on a client’s channel marketing program, regardless of their role in the development, delivery or ongoing operations of the program.
The Delivery part of the process puts the team on the path of executing the identified program elements. The Outcomes Blueprint focuses on incremental progress, showcasing the small wins that lead to the big wins and, ultimately, ensuring a company’s channel program is supporting its north star. At this point, it’s all about executing the defined strategies, delivering customer experience and ensuring what is being delivered meets or exceeds the established ROI criteria. In other words, ensuring the previous steps in the process are executed with full transparency to ensure confidence in what is being delivered and how it is being delivered.
The Outcomes Blueprint is designed to ensure a program’s defined strategies, customer experience expectations and ROI criteria are measured and reported. Outcomes may include reports within a particular program application, data analysis and ad hoc reporting, or providing data feeds for a client’s business intelligence application. After 20 years of delivering outcomes, Channel Fusion understands there is typically more than one outcome when it comes to a channel marketing program, so quantifying and reporting those outcomes and ensuring the appropriate stakeholders have visibility is paramount.
Regularly scheduled status and update calls, along with quarterly business reviews, and delivery of key performance indicators on an established cadence help ensure program elements are being tracked, measured and adjusted as needed. Ultimately, the Channel Fusion Outcomes Blueprint ensures alignment around channel program objectives and how those efforts support a company’s north star.
About Channel Fusion
For 20 years, Channel Fusion has been delivering strategy, customer experience and return on investment outcomes for brands and their channel partners with a wide variety of solutions and industry expertise. We continue to invest in the overall ecosystem of our channel marketing offering to ensure our clients can provide their channel partners with an optimal customer experience to drive results. Our core technologies and connected platform are supported by a team of customer-centric “Fusers.” Let us know if you’d like to learn more about how we deliver desired outcomes for brands and their channel partners.