In March of 2008, we began an initiative I called: “It’s the channel stupid!” It was one of our five initiatives for the year. We intended not to construct a sales channel for ourselves; but, rather we sought to apply our application across our customer’s sales channel. The idea was to allow a company to “syndicate” its’ selling and marketing content so that all of its employees could use it to communicate to and through the distribution channel. We formulated the idea, and shared it with one of our larger customers ─ they asked us to get started, and our “serving the extended enterprise” use case was off and running.

Flash forward 15 months, and now our Media, Entertainment and Technology (MET) business unit is seeing a large uptick in inbound lead activity. And these are not small companies. I am surprised by this as we have done almost no marketing around this initiative. So, we ask all inquirers where they heard about us. The answer: “…a salesperson from ___________told me about how they are using you.”

The why part is something I can only surmise. The economic recovery is underway (may not be broad-based or universal) and insightful companies realize they need to do things better, faster, smarter, and more effectively to grow their top-line revenues. A consistent theme we are hearing is: “…we want to find better ways to help our distribution channel be more effective. We want to help them sell.”

June 3-5, 2009, TechAmerica is sponsoring the Channels 2.0 event in San Jose. The focus of the conference is the distribution of On-Demand applications. I have been asked to join a panel to talk about the nature of sales channels for SaaS companies, and to provide some insight into how we support our customer’s sales channels. I hope you can make it; I will be writing about my experience and what else I learned at the event.