Deal registration is one of the oldest and most common tools in the channel chief’s toolkit. For partners, it protects business development investments and customer relationships and is an incentive to acquire and win more business. For vendors, it stimulates partner activity, provides active partners with a competitive advantage, and provides visibility into partner pipelines.
In practice, deal registration is largely misunderstood, misapplied, and mistrusted. While 82% of partners surveyed by Channelnomics say deal registration is important to their success with a vendor, many fear that providing opportunity information to the vendor could compromise their sales and customer relationships. On the other hand, vendors often forget that deal registration is a tool for gaining visibility into the partner pipeline and tracking productivity. These drawbacks create operational friction both within vendor organizations and externally with partners.
This Channelnomics primer provides insights into the basics of deal registration — its purpose, its possible frameworks, the channel conflict management around it, and its financial impact on vendor and partner go-to-market relationships. The primer is not intended as a blueprint for building deal registration programs but as a starting point for formulating and defining frameworks.