Symbiotic Support Channels: The First Book about Delivering Technical Support via Channel Partners

June 6, 2012 - PRLog -- Sunol, CA— June 6, 2012 —  Many technology companies leverage partners in the sales channel, but the body of knowledge available to guide planning, implementing, and managing support partners hasn’t kept up. Support channels are overlooked and under-served as a discipline of study and published resources.

“The handshake between OEMs and their support channel partners is rapidly shifting with the new technology consumption models. Yet, the body of available publications and research isn’t keeping up,” said Thomas Lah, Executive Director at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), “that’s why the TSIA supported this engaging book on the tactics OEMs pursue to successfully work with channel partners. In many ways, it could not have arrived at better time, because this book shines a bright light on what is working and not working in the world of partner management.“

Participating in the broader sales channel program is a source of many unique challenges for most support organizations.

Symbiotic Support Channels captures what the best partner programs are doing to create powerful support partners. It also provides insights into informal and undocumented activities that contribute significantly to partner effectiveness and success. This book highlights the inter-dependencies and tradeoffs of operating a support channel so readers can best take advantage of their corporate cultures and resources to create powerful support partners.

Some of the world’s most effective channel-focused technology vendors share how they: select the right partners, enable partner success, support partner escalations, measure partner achievements, compensate partners to reward desired behaviors, and manage partner performance. Program approaches, methodologies, and richly detailed content from hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews demonstrate how leading technology companies create and maintain effective support partner programs. Industry experts also provide their views of what success looks like and and how to achieve it.

“Technical support is often an undervalued but critical function of indirect channel partnerships.” said Beth Vanni, Vice President at PartnerPath. “PartnerPath provided our research and best practices input for this book to validate the need for IT vendors to clearly segment and resource the development of their partners managing support services.”

Symbiotic Support Channels is available from Amazon.com

About the Author

Eric Eidson is a veteran technical support leader. He has been responsible for support delivery operations, maximizing support revenue through leveraging direct sales, channels, and strategic partner relationships, and developing and implementing support marketing strategy. Companies he’s worked for include Sybase, BEA Systems, and Applied Materials. He has also done consulting for leading technology industry companies. Eric has served as co- chair for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) support partner community of interest.