I’m doing a bit of “California Dreaming” this week while here in San Francisco at Channel Visionaries – The Cloud Channel Series 2015.

It’s a great event that brings together the most forward-thinking thought leaders and cloud channel executives from leading vendors, distributors and solution providers in the IT and telecom industries. It’s also an incredible opportunity to soak up knowledge and insights from true channel visionaries, those who are using new ideas coupled with next-generation technology to break though barriers to partner engagement, brand allegiance, content and social media challenges and more. In other words, it’s the place where the industry is actually turning channel dreams into reality.

Zift & SiriusDecisions Share the Spotlight

One of the highlights of the week was a key note address from Zift’s President and CEO Ken Romley and Maria Chien, Service Director, Channel Marketing Strategies of SiriusDecisions. As Chien noted, “Few B2B leaders selling through indirect channels are actually achieving their goals.” Their presentation, “Key Ingredients for a Positive & Profitable Partner Experience” demonstrated:

  • How to overcome critical partner engagement challenges via a marriage of SiriusDecisions’ Partner Experience and Maturity Model with a proven Channel Marketing and Management (CMM) Platform
  • Why many of today’s channel partners are ignoring suppliers and resist adopting CMM technologies, including too many vendors and initiatives, lack of value, difficult to use, gaps in partner skills and resources
  • The importance of using Cloud technology to support the partner experience, which promotes scalability and the flexibility to plug in new capabilities and needs and opportunities shift directly into the systems partners already use

Here are a few pics from the show:

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If you missed the event, be sure to keep your eyes out for the next event coming in April of 2016.

Did you make it to the Channel Visionaries event?

What were your takeaways?