When it comes to spending money on your business, you need to make sure your cash delivers return on investment (ROI). These days, the ability to measure results is essentially a requirement for businesses. For example, marketing teams use marketing automation tools and sales teams use CRM systems to gauge the effectiveness of their impact. Although companies don’t hesitate to pour money into sales and marketing tools, tools built for channel teams often take a back seat in these kinds of investments. It’s time for this to change! By investing in modern channel technology, you can supercharge channel sales, improve productivity, enhance the partner experience, and make your program stand out among the rest. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you should approach ROI of channel technology. 
Improved Channel Manager Productivity
Imagine if you suddenly took marketing automation tools away from your marketing team. Do you think their jobs would stay the same? Or would getting great results require a considerable amount of additional effort? Conversely, giving your channel team purpose-built tools to manage the channel program makes their jobs much easier. Suddenly, tasks that had to be completed by hand are automated—helping teams reclaim time that they can then invest in other important areas of operations. As a result, your channel team is able to get more done, more effectively, in less time.Improved Partner Experience
Channel tech isn’t just designed to make your team’s lives easier. It also makes life easier for partners too. Unfortunately, you can’t just roll out new channel tools, tell you partners to start using them, and expect great outcomes. For the best results, your channel team needs to tell partners exactly how the technology will benefit them. For example, you might tell them that leading channel technology solutions allow you to measure partner influence on a granular level—thereby enabling you to make sure that partners are compensated with exactly how much they’re owed. Modern channel solutions also make it easy to see which partners are performing at the highest levels. This, in turn, makes it easier to determine where to allocate market development funds (MDF), which can further improve the partner experience. By effectively communicating these benefits to your partners, you can increase the adoption of your channel tech and get continuously improving results because of it.Improved Partner Performance
Are your partners hitting their goals and driving revenue? If you can’t answer that question without manually analyzing data, you’re doing it wrong. Unless your channel program is perfectly fine with paying someone $75 an hour to chase deals and nudge partners to get them to perform specific actions, you need to start thinking about how channel technology can increase partner performance. For example, the right solutions automatically remind partners to keep deal statuses updated. And with complete visibility into the pipeline, partners can also easily see where deals stand and get a better idea of the revenue that is ultimately headed their way. This is compared to channel programs that cloak everything in secrecy—a method that doesn’t exactly encourage time-strapped partners to give it their all.Closed-Loop ROI
Modern channel solutions like Vartopia enable you to close the loop on ROI. In other words, Vartopia lets you easily determine if your MDF, co-op funds, and incentive dollars are being spent effectively. Armed with this information, it becomes that much easier to determine which partners it makes sense to invest money in, and whether it is time to cut ties with low-performing partners.Improved Channel Program Prestige
When you invest in modern channel technology, you immediately show your partners that you take your channel very seriously. Remember, it’s not uncommon for partners to work with 10, 20, or even more vendors. Chances are that the majority of those vendors do not use modern channel solutions. By giving your partners modern digital experiences, you immediately differentiate your program from the rest—giving you the prestige needed to attract the most effective partners to get involved with your channel.It’s Time to Take Channel ROI Seriously
If you’re struggling to gauge the ROI of channel sales, your organization needs a new approach to your partner program. It’s that simple. To learn why more and more channel managers are relying on Vartopia to take their programs to the next level, request a demo of Vartopia today.