Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Laz Gonzalez, Chief Strategy Officer at Zift Solutions:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Zift Solutions is pioneering Enterprise Channel Management with ZiftONE. The ZiftONE platform integrates channel sales, marketing, enablement, and operations – all in 23 languages. We’re empowering the entire channel sales funnel from lead to revenue with comprehensive reporting, analysis, and benchmarking to drive both channel optimization and overall business success. In 2020, we were proud that ZiftONE was named the only Leader in both Through Channel Marketing Automation and Partner Relationship Management by Forrester Research.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: We’ve recently launched a new capability in the ZiftONE platform called Success Plans. Using this, suppliers and partners will be able to work together for more collaborative business planning. Success Plans help teams develop strategies that account for training goals, marketing activities, and a full range of metrics. This isn’t like typical top-down business plans that only look at historic sales or performance data. Success Plans incorporate strategies that go far beyond the traditional methods and get to the heart of what really drives channel success.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: The big-picture goal of ZiftONE is to empower partners and suppliers through complete support for driving indirect channel success. In the case of Success Plans, we’re not only providing a means for supplier/partner collaboration but a way to get channel data front and center for all participants. We also do this with other ZiftONE features like Partner Explorer and our analytics dashboards.
Ultimately, we believe companies with that deeper level of data will achieve better decision making and greater success. This can be the “make it or break it” move that positions channel partner programs as company differentiators.
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We’re always focused on working with suppliers and their partners to transform channel management. Right now, that’s being done by improving and updating ZiftONE based on the needs of channel suppliers. Soon, we’ll be releasing extensions to our learning management system, working on a tool that helps promote virtual events and webinars, and will be expanding our social media syndication. If you think about the entire relationship between supplier and channel partners, you’re looking at maintaining sales, operations, enablement, and marketing. Over the next several months we’ll be making changes and improvements to help in all four of those areas.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: We’re committed to channel transparency. In the world of Zift, that means putting data, analytics, and insights directly into the hands of suppliers so they can make better decisions about partner relationships. We also have an incredible team of on-staff channel pros that can guide suppliers on channel best practices, ways to create excellence in partner programs, and steps for making marketing easier. At the end of the day, channel management is only effective when you have all of the key tools you need to build successful outcomes.
