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How we ranked the Channel Champions
By Dhaval Valia
| Knowledge Partner |  |
The CRN Channel Champions survey was put together to provide a definitive index of plotting channel satisfaction in the country. The US edition of CRN has been conducting the survey for over 17 years now.
While the basic methodology comes from CRN US, we have customized it to factor in local market dynamics and
ground realities.
The main objective of the entire exercise is to lend a voice to channel perception and experience in dealing with vendors who drive their business. At the same time, the survey aims to provide vendors a neutral view on channel expectations and how well they are managing channels and helping them grow.
For this year’s survey we polled 1,011 respondents across 55 cities through a combination of tele-research and online poll across 13 product categories. A large portion of these were from small cities, which in itself is ample evidence of the growing need among channels to be heard. The fact that 40 percent of our votes came online is proof that the Internet is getting pervasive.
Each respondent was allowed to vote for a maximum of three categories, specifically for vendors that contributed substantial revenues to his/her business.
With 40 percent of the respondents voting in more than one category, we got a total of 1,852 votes or vendor evaluations. Overall, 60 percent votes were polled from tier-2 and tier-3 cities.
Survey criteria: At its most basic level, the Channel Champions survey works by asking participants to rate their satisfaction with particular vendors across five main criteria and 19 sub-criteria.
Price-performance: Includes sub-criteria like product features, quality and reliability, rate of in-warranty failures and price.
Product availability: Includes parameters like regular availability of products, and whether a product is over-distributed or under-distributed. As vendors hone their distribution strategy to capitalize on the huge growth in the smaller cities, availability becomes critical.
Service & support: Includes aspects like pre-sales support (for enterprise products), warranty policy, RMA turnaround and escalation mechanism, toll-free support, and in several product categories even lead generation.
Training and certification: Regular sales and technology training provided, online training resources, product specific training, and the value and effectiveness of vendor certification.
Marketing and branding: Plotted the brand-pull enjoyed by vendors among end-customers, local marketing and promotions to support the channel business, and market development funds provided to partners for business development and creating new markets.
Channel relationship: Under this criterion we sought to poll channels on their satisfaction regarding the relationship management of vendors. While issues are commonplace between channels and vendors, what often makes a vendor more preferred is whether these issues are handled with fairness and transparency. The best test of any relationship is in times of distress. Respondents voted on parameters like channel policy and management, fairness and transparency of processes and people; and accessibility and responsiveness of managers.
Scoring: Each respondent voted for the most preferred vendor across various sub-parameters. They were also asked to rate the importance of the main criteria for every product category. For instance, in the components segment, service, support and product availability were rated the most important criteria.
In the enterprise category, the most important criteria turned out to be channel relationship management as here the channels are dependent on vendors for finance and pricing support, technical and pre-sales support, and also for providing training and certification. Also, a majority of resellers dealing in enterprise products are certified/authorized partners, and hence their expectations from vendors hinge more on channel relationship management.
Based on the votes polled and the importance of the criteria, we arrived at the final ranking. Vendors who polled less than 5 percent vote in any category were not considered eligible and were taken off the final list. |