ChannelOps: The Missing Piece of RevOps

Revops Evolved From SalesOps And Needs To Evolve Again To Include ChannelOps

By Demar Amacker, Senior Director of Business Operations, Zift Solutions

References to rapid evolution in tech are cliche, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. And it’s not just in hardware and software. Service and operations models are also battlefronts for innovation and competitive differentiation.

Within this swiftly changing landscape, Revenue Operations, or RevOps, is gaining ground over SalesOps, as a more effective way to drive revenue growth by focusing on the customer experience from cradle to grave, rather than only the sales experience.

What’s conspicuously missing from RevOps so far is ChannelOps. Indirect channel sales models that leverage third parties are pervasive, yet most are managed by completely separate sales, marketing and service operations.

What Is RevOps?

RevOps focuses on the resources required to drive revenue from the time a prospect considers a purchase to when they buy, when they need help, when they buy again and when they refer or recommend. In so doing, RevOps provides a holistic view of the customer journey and maximizes the customer’s lifetime value (CLV). In practice, RevOps aligns people, processes and technologies across sales, marketing, customer service and financial operations.

What Is ChannelOps?

Channel Operations, or ChannelOps, refers to the end-to-end management of indirect sales channels. ChannelOps aim to align the people and processes needed to sell through channel partners and serve their clients. ChannelOps functions include:

• Channel partner recruitment and onboarding
• Channel partner enablement and engagement
• Channel administrative and commissions management

Streamlining and optimizing ChannelOps strives to achieve key performance outcomes, including:

• Revenue generation and retention through the delivery of superior experiences for sales partners and their customers
• Channel optimization via data insights and better decision making
• Reliable, repeatable processes that scale across channel activities

How Do ChannelOps Fit Into RevOps?

The case for including ChannelOps in RevOps is straightforward. Channel operations are about revenue generation, which, by definition, is a revenue operation. Digging deeper, however, combining ChannelOps with RevOps achieves the 360-degree view that RevOps promises. The combination enables you to optimize processes and go-to-market strategy, steer resources to impact revenue generation, and get transparency and accountability across all revenue operations.

To successfully integrate ChannelOps into RevOps, you need tools and systems to synchronize direct and indirect sales data, processes and documentation. And it needs to be easy for your channel team leaders to manage. You want them focused on activities that move the needle— go-to-market strategies, sales playbooks, partner success planning and engagement, and ensuring smooth onboarding of sales partners and their clients.

The right tools also provide actionable data that helps to better direct those efforts. Ultimately, your goal should be a toolset that lets you deliver growth assets, drive engagement at scale, and track the results of those efforts to increase the potency of your strategy and planning. It’s this process— leveraging empowerment tools that provide the feedback and data you need to meet your sales needs better and extract maximum value from your revenue operations – that should underpin your strategy for integrating ChannelOps into RevOps.

Demar Amacker is a seasoned RevOps Leader who was named a 2022 top 25 revenueoperations leader by Revenue.io. Amacker is part of the leadership team at Zift Solutions, a leading provider of Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) solutions. He joined the company as Director of Revenue Operations and was quickly promoted to his current role as Senior Director of Business Operations. Previously, Amacker co-founded a RevOps consultancy, where he leveraged his expertise in go-to-market strategy, sales, SaaS strategy, operations, finance, procurement, vendor management, and business intelligence. During his career, he has overseen large-scale systems implementations, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, integrations, data architecture and business intelligence (BI) tools.