I attended Jeff Kaplan’s Cloud Channel Summit today. Clearly cloud channel sales is in its infancy, but there were some companies here with successful channel strategies including Salesforce.com (1400 partners and counting), Scribe and others. Lesson 4: The primary role of the cloud channel today is integration. MORE >>

Research and development, sample making, marketing the product and perhaps even handling some of the preliminary sales are some of the stages of expansion. However, with my handbag company charm and luck , to grow our business we realized we needed to find sales partners to handle our sales. Ask probing questions. MORE >>

In some cases, these companies are part of a product sales and distribution line from manufacturer to customer. Channel conflict has been a steady topic of discussion for decades, and the accelerating shift to the Cloud has added substantial new concerns and pressures to the conversation. Is there room for the channel in the Cloud? MORE >>

I recently helped a friend broker the sale of his small, bootstrapped company. This is a smart guy with experience and a logical approach to such things, but the way he was initially trying to value his company was not only wrong, but the wrong way to think about the entire sale. To stoke an existing sales channel. MORE >>

People browse, choose, pay and troubleshoot products using mobile sites, apps and social media shaking the ground for multi-channel retailers, who until now mainly focused on their brand and brick and mortar shops. In a nutshell, the more integrated online and offline are, the better the customer experience and sales growth. MORE >>