I was chatting with a Channel Partner’s sales person a few days ago. This particular gentleman has been in the business for decades, and probably have seen it all. When we started talking about co-selling with the vendor, the topic of “account mapping” (the practice of finding accounts, that belong to the partner’s customer base, that could be a target for the vendor’s products).
He laughed.
Then he explained it: account mapping does not make any sense to do if the vendor is not bringing something of value to their customer. Either something new, or something better than the existing one. It doesn’t make sense either, if it doesn’t solve a problem for the customer.
This is the part that channel managers forget sometimes. I’ve been watching a trend, where this exercise is now spun up as something new, something that adds to inbound and outbound marketing. Something that helps “to identify overlapping accounts”. They call it something different, but to me it is just plain account mapping.
I can see the partner’s eyes rolling.