A typical dialogue between channel sales managers and indirect sales representatives is the management of Leads and Opportunities.

The Channel Manager has oversight of each partners opportunities and acts as a referee in situations where 2 partners are pursuing the same opportunity.

i-Dialogue PRM Portal helps to mitigate channel conflict with a database of Channel Registrations that associate Leads and Opportunities with specific partners. i-Dialogue also sends email alerts to partners, such as reminding a Sales Rep that their opportunity registration will expire in 60 days unless updated.

Here is a typical channel registration workflow managed by the portal.

The process is not completely automated. An internal Account or Channel Manager must intervene in the early stages to determine if a submitted registration conflicts with an existing registration.

The ability to identify and resolve conflicts is directly associated with the quality of data collected by the portal. "Company" or "Account Name" is the most common identifier of exclusivity, but territory, industry, or product type may also be used.

To this end, the first report created in the CRM system should be a quick list of all open channel registrations by Company name. The portal could "attempt" to identify a conflict based on Company name, but because of variances in spelling (such as "IBM" or "I.B.M") this task is best left to human intervention.

Once a registration has been assigned, the portal loops 1-N times over step 6, sending out emails every 30 days (this is customizable) to help gently "prod" the partner to touch the prospect and update the CRM record.

What happens if other Partners register the same opportunity? In this dialogue flow, the conflict may be noted as an activity and later re-assigned to other partners on a "first come, first served" basis.

Because the registrations are managed as Opportunities in Salesforce, existing reports can be leveraged for forecasting and demand planning.