Your strategic decision has been made that the time is right to enter the EMEA or European market. The reasons can be: there is an increasing customer demand in this market and you want to accelerate your revenue opportunities; that a competitive advantage can be realized by entering this market in an earlier stage; your first worldwide customers demand your presence or simply because early international presence could optimize your company valuation. It could also be that you already entered the market and signed up a few early stage partners, but are looking to expand or formalize your channel efforts and offers. Either way, besides the obvious challenge around performance and costs, determining the best and most successful road-to-market for your company is highly important.
NovoQuest offers four different Building Stones which can be applied to your channel efforts: channel strategy, channel program building, channel introduction and channel expansion. You can decide to have all of them covered by NovoQuest or pick and choose which is best suited for your situation. We are more than happy to discuss the optimal choice for you!
Building Stone “Channel Strategy”
The Building Stone “Channel Strategy” is all about ensuring you make the right decision. The choices regarding, strategy, investments, channel and execution will make the difference between a successful EMEA launch, or a costly delay which can restrain a vendor’s growth in today’s already decreasing product life cycles. Getting your products to market quickly and finding the right partners to establish a positive and productive market presence in EMEA is critical to the overall success. NovoQuest will gather all relevant information available, research (market) possibilities for you and advise you on your best strategy and road-to-market in a recommendation report, including priority countries.
Example projects on channel strategy are with the security software vendors Avecto and Scense.
Building Stone “Channel Program”
The next Building Stone “Channel Program Building” can build upon the outcome of the channel strategy but could also be based on your preferred road-to-market or a review of your existing channel program. Within the package you can expect all details of working with such channels, including the creation and adjustments of channel materials. The channel program itself is the main document in which we mutually decide upon the targets, constraints (if any), objectives and the “asks and gives” for the channel partners. This can include: minimum requirements for partners, pricing and discounting, marketing support, sales and technical training and tools, use of portal, account registration and CRM system etc. As soon as the general channel program is completed, NovoQuest will start with other related deliverables, both internal (like processes and procedures) as well as external (for example partner agreements or sales enablement tools). Projects in which NovoQuest has build complete channel programs are with software vendors Scense and DynamicOps.
Building Stone “Channel Introduction”
With the Building Stone "Channel Introduction" you are ensured that the initial stage of entering the channel in the EMEA/European market is done by professional and experienced people who understand the European channel, the program and how to approach and enter a new market. The Building Stone is set-up entirely in light of recruiting the right partners and preparing this channel to become productive (in a repeatable and sustainable sense) within a 6 to 12 months’ timeframe (depending on your offering, stage, sales cycle and needs). In this ‘recruitment and readiness’ stage there will also be room to make adjustments to the components of the proposed market entry on all the different levels to provide the optimal “road to market` for you. A few of our projects on Channel Introduction are with security software vendor Avecto and Cloud Computing vendor DynamicOps.
Building Stone “Channel Expansion”
The "Channel Expansion" Building Stone is really the extension of "Channel Introduction". Throughout the duration of this phase the focus is on continuing channel revenue growth and adjusting the model with the focus on accelerating the productivity and deeper penetration in the already established market regions within EMEA. There will also be more channel partners acquired and possible new markets/countries entered, depending on the market demand and scalability. In this phase (which typically is between 1 and 2 years) a more active operational role will be played by the NovoQuest virtual team and vendor to be in front of prospects and partners. Visiting the lighthouse customers (prospects, end customers and partners) on a bi-monthly or quarterly base will be a fundamental part of this stage to assure that we keep the momentum and operations moving into the right direction. One of our projects on the Building Stone "Channel Introduction" is with security software vendor Avecto.
