SalesTechStar Interview with Gloria Kee, VP of Product Management at Model N

How can brands drive more value from their channel and partnership models? Gloria Kee, VP of Product Management at Model N shares a few tips:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Gloria, tell us more about yourself and your role at Model N?

I am currently VP of Product Management at Model N. During my 15 years at the company, I’ve gained an in-depth understanding of implementing and designing innovative software across a variety of business challenges with a particular focus on the life sciences and high-tech industries. In my role, I work to understand customer needs and business processes so our team can deliver solutions that address evolving market challenges.

We’d love to hear about Model N’s recent partnership with Impartner and how it helps end users minimize revenue losses?

Our integration with Impartner is designed to enhance high-tech manufacturers’ overall experience working with sales channels. The solution improves processes related to revenue management, partner incentives, and rebates. As businesses achieve significant revenue milestones, they often start to explore the potential of their partnership programs. As these programs grow, they become more complex to manage. This integrated solution aims to address growing complexity and streamline the management of revenue optimization, partner incentives, and compliance requirements.

In research we conducted with Forrester earlier this year, manufacturing leaders named a unified channel partner portal a top opportunity to improve revenue management processes, so we’re excited to bring the combined power of Model N’s Channel Data Management and Impartner’s partner management to the market

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What can manufacturers do to optimize their channel/partner experience, what kind of tools come handy at this stage?

Tools for channel data management, partner management, price intelligence, and rebate management are table stakes. The complexity and breadth of channel relationships are too great to manage deals with spreadsheets. We’re talking about manufacturers with tens of thousands of channel partners worldwide. The absence of effective tools to manage global quoting, pricing, and rebates causes revenue loss.

Commonly, miscommunications, stale data, and even human error cause incorrect reimbursement, duplicate rebating, and other issues. These are known pain points that manufacturers can solve.

Can you highlight some of the most disruptive partnership models you’ve seen in B2B and the key takeaways from those?

It’s difficult to name just one. Looking back to the mid 2010’s, I’d point out the novelty of GE’s partnership with Intel to bring the Predix preventative maintenance platform to a much wider audience. Predictive maintenance as a business practice is common now, but less so eight or 10 years ago. When I think about high-tech companies like the ones Model N works with and what kinds of partnerships they’ve struck, that one stands out. Intel saw an opportunity not only to implement the technology in its own factories, but having the power of the GE and Intel names side by side lent significant credibility to the technology. When we have customers collaborating like this, Model N enables both companies to generate maximum revenue from the offering.

What are some of the biggest lags surrounding partnership management that most brands still struggle with?

One of the biggest lags is a lack of visibility. Gathering accurate, consistent, and granular point-of-sale (POS), inventory, and claims data from the channel is challenging for even the best companies because data tends to be siloed. Channel data management (CDM) plays a key role in solving this problem. Layering a CDM solution like Model N on top of a partner portal enriches the data, accelerates analysis, and removes manual processes to provide business, finance, procurement, and sales departments better insight into all channels.

Onboarding a new partner can also be challenging. In most companies, resources are stretched thin trying to onboard, train, and retain partners while also managing existing relationships. Companies must develop modern approaches to automating partner onboarding as well as daily partner management. By streamlining both operations and communications, everyone involved can focus on selling and generating revenue-growth activities.

Can you talk about the future of channel and partner management solutions and how they will evolve as industry needs change?

We’re in a critical moment for high-tech manufacturers. Despite continued pressures due to supply costs and labor challenges, significant opportunities lie ahead. There are billions of dollars of U.S. investment through the CHIPS Act, a similar commitment to production in Europe, and a global surge in semiconductor demand due to the rapid rise of generative AI applications that require tremendous computing power.

The manufacturers that ultimately come out on top, both in terms of weathering lingering pandemic challenges and maximizing these new opportunities, will be the ones that can create maximum value from every quote and sale without creating new revenue gaps even amid massive production increases. It’s not an understatement that revenue optimization is a multimillion-dollar opportunity for these companies, and the companies’ approaches will need to evolve to address new market realities including distributed production across the U.S. and Europe, as well as continued reliance on speciality assembly and packaging firms overseas. To be effective, solutions must support global partnerships including multiple currencies, mass price changes, and complete channel visibility.

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