Additional Blogs by SAP
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Partner Channel Management

Partner Channel Management (PCM) is more than just managing your relationships with Partners. The philosophy is to bring together SAP’s strength in Customer Relationship Management with Partner Relationship Management and Web Channel - areas to help add value to a brand owners’ channel solution.

Channel Marketing

According to Gartner, one of the top priorities for CRM in 2008 is collaboration and one area in CRM Marketing that shows increase spending  is “Partner, Distributed and Field Marketing”. We have to look at this statistic with the prevailing economic conditions in mind. The statistic indicates “Partner, Distributed and Field Marketing” is an important area where companies want to invest. However, the current situation means that brand owners will have less to invest and will demand more from whatever they end up investing. Every brand owner is fighting for a share of a considerable depleted wallet of the customer.

This calls for Marketing efficiency and Marketing effectiveness – the principal drivers of SAP’s CRM marketing solution. Marketing efficiency focuses on operational excellence – cost reduction and productivity gains. Marketing effectiveness focuses on customer conversations – this involves building long term customer relationships, driving up demand etc. For example: increase the value of a brand owners product or service to the customers.

PCM brings the marketing solution to the brand owners’ channels and enables collaboration between the brand owner and the channel partner to drive up value. For brand owners, the PCM marketing solution brings value through simple sharing of costs incurred for marketing activities and/or, perhaps more importantly, by tapping into the partners’ close knowledge of the customers. The latter is especially true when most of a brand owners business is being done through partners and partner are the touch point to the end customers (car dealers, for example). For Partners, value comes from cost savings, improved processes, better access to the brand owner and empowerment to service the customers better -which in turn helps the brand owner.

And when the partners are empowered, customers reap the benefit of consistent, relevant and personalized information on products, better support and service and wider access to the brand. A happy customer translates to a happy business!

SAP CRM PCM Channel Marketing is on its way to deliver more value to our customers through continued enhancement to it Marketing portfolio and making them "partner enabled". This and future blogs will continue to talk about various aspects of marketing in the context of partners and how SAP CRM continues to drive innovation to help create more value for Brand Owners, Partners and Customers!

2 Comments