What's Keeping Channel Chiefs Up at Night

Alright, hello everyone. My name is Lauren Dietz and I welcome you to today's webinar, What's Keeping Channel Chiefs Up at Night? Over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we'll cover the results of a research study we conducted of channel execs and professionals on what they are and are not getting from their channel partners and what they are or are not doing about it. And with that, I'll pass it over to Tim.

Thank you, Lauren. Hello everyone, my name is Tim Harman with Fielo. Many of you, I think, may remember me from my days as an industry analyst. I was with Forrester Research for 10 years and with Metagroup for 6 years, where I covered global channels research for those industry analyst firms. And, you know, bringing to bear a lot of that knowledge an insight into, you know, what it means for, you know, customers today. And I talk regularly with channel chiefs, and when I get the opportunity, I usually ask them what is it that keeps them up at night, what is it that they see as their biggest challenge. And one conversation just a few months ago stood out to me. I was talking with him and he said, you know, Tim, managing the channel is kind of like herding cats. You can't direct them like you would employees to do what you want them to do. You can only ask them, plead with them, scold them, educate them, influence them, and incentivize them. He goes, but there are so many moving parts of things that you want them to do or to be able to do or to do better, and I have a limited budget, right? I can't— I can ask them to do everything that I want them to do, but when it comes to, you know, incentivization in whatever form that would take, I have, you know, budget limits. And so I have to pick the right things, the right areas that I think are going to be the most effective, have the most impact downstream in terms of revenue generation. So I thought that was very insightful. We, we set out to answer, you know, his questions about those moving parts, which moving parts to focus on, by conducting a research study. And we did. We employed a market research firm, Dynata, to, uh, to carry out a research study for us of channel executives and channel professionals of across 3 different industries. So the tech industry, the manufacturing industry, mostly industrial manufacturing, and the consumer goods industry. And you can see the numbers that we got. So we had 103 respondents in tech, 130 manufacturing, 64 in consumer goods, and we split them up by company size, right? So less than a billion, we consider to be medium, and large would be a billion and above. I'm going to share with you today the results from that research study, which I think are pretty insightful. The, uh, we started out in the research study asking them about various things, business processes, functions, capabilities, results, what have you, that they were interested in, um, in terms of their channel partners' performance. Okay, and group these into, you know, 5 groups as you can see here. So under marketing, you know, we asked them how their channel partners were performing and what their expectations were in terms of brand compliance, marketing activities, lead generation, developing leads, and market targeting. Over on the right, you can see this grouping that we did of sales functions. So how are your channel partners doing, and what are your expectations of them in terms of sales forecasting, deal registration, developing opportunities, managing the sales cycle, you know, things like that. Customer experience, um, management functions, so business planning, inventory management, visibility into business performance, KPIs. And then we also ask about, you know, is product knowledge important to you, your channel partner's product knowledge? How about partner engagement? How important is that to you? We ask 3 questions, right? What do you value the most? So out of all of these things, which ones have the highest value to you? You know, to your company. We then ask them, which ones are you most dissatisfied with? Okay, and finally we ask, which ones do you incentivize, right, and how much do you incentivize if you do? And so you can guess that there may not be perfect alignment across all these questions, but we're going to try to bring that misalignment, if you will, into focus to give you some insights on, on what it is that you perhaps should be focusing on. So I'll talk about the 3 vertical industries that we, that we surveyed: tech, manufacturing, consumer goods. I'm going to talk about something called what we call PVIs, the Pain Value Index. As you can imagine, we combined how painful or how dissatisfied a channel executive was with respect to their channel partner's performance with the value that they see in that particular function, uh, and combine that, come up, can come up with this concept of the pain-value index, right? Because Something that's very, very painful but not very valuable, you know, maybe you shouldn't pay a lot of attention to it. You know, something that's very valuable but not very painful, you probably don't have to invest a lot more in it, right? So the things that are both painful and valuable though are where you need to look very closely to see if you need to do things differently, change things up with respect to getting more productivity and better performance and better engagement out of your channel partner ecosystem. And then finally, I will wrap up and show some comparisons across all three industries of how they, of what they're doing and how they're seeing their respective channels. So let's start with tech. Right. What is most valued? Well, number 1, you can see here, is the length and management of the sales cycle. How long these deals take to close. And what stands out, uh, for this being number 1 is that 100%, every single respondent said that that particular goal was highly valuable. I can tell you that all of my years of research, I have never gotten a 100% answer. Never. But so I was amazed that 100%, absolutely everybody in the tech industry said length management sales cycle is very critical to us, very important, very valuable. You know, it's followed by, as you can see, overall customer satisfaction, you know, developing opportunities into closed deals. Acquiring new customers, customer support, and product knowledge, right? So you can see that these are the things that channel chiefs, channel executives, channel professionals hold most dear to their heart in terms of the value that they believe it brings to their, their bottom lines. What are they— so what do they find most unsatisfactory? What's most painful for them? Well, lo and behold, look at that. The length of the sales cycle is number 1, so most valuable but also most painful. You might guess that that's going to be high on the P— the Pain Value Index, the PVI, right? Uh, what else? So business planning, uh, is a— is painful for them. So a lot of tech companies actually now ask their channel partners, their distributors, their resellers, their MSPs, their systems integrators, what have you, to actually do a better job in terms of business planning, right? So that they can, you know, factor their channel partners' business plans into their own resource allocations and their own resource commitment. But not very many of them are doing it well. It's a big pain. Upselling and cross-selling is a pain point. Acquiring new customers, gaining visibility into business performance KPIs. So think about this. This was long the story in the tech channel, that there was a black box when it came to what your channel partners were doing. They said, hey, we will resell your products, but we're not going to tell you anything about what they're doing. Now that perception, that understanding, that relationship has been changing now for about a decade. But still, it looks that tech companies want more information into, you know, what their channel partners are doing and how they're performing, particularly against the business plan, right? Because we saw business planning was also hot. And then last but certainly not least— it's not last, these were the top 6, right, out of 20-some-odd functions and capabilities, but here we have specific market targeting. So not very happy, you know, when as a corporate strategy they go into specific geographical markets or specific vertical markets or specific company size markets and their channel partners don't follow suit, right? So that can be a pain. Like I said, you know, if you would have— if you would guess that length of the sales cycle, because it is highly valued and because it's so painful, is number 1 on PVI, you would be absolutely right. So when we factor the 2 together, how dissatisfied or painful that particular function is for those that are responsible for managing and supporting their channel partners with the value that they see in it, it gets a very high PBI of 33, right? Business planning, we saw that high in terms of both pain and value, and so not surprising that's in second. Acquiring new customers and upselling cross-selling. So these are the, the 4 highest activities that channel professionals value and yet are not getting adequate performance from their channel partners for, right? So high value, high pain. Here's another concept that I want to introduce you, something called incentive dissonance. So remember we asked them, you know, what is valuable to you, what is What are you dissatisfied with? And what is your approach to incentivization? How do you incentivize these various activities? So I'm going to lay this out. Let's talk about first incentivization, incentivization alignment with these PBIs. So here are the top 4 PBIs from the last slide. Length of the sales cycle was number 1. Business planning was number 2. Acquiring new customers is number 3, and upselling and cross-selling was number 4. And we asked, you know, do you actually incentivize that function? And only 3%, only 3%, 3 out of 100 companies are incentivizing channel partners to improve their performance when it comes to managing the time of the sales cycle, the time it takes to close deals. That is what we call incentive dissonance, right? They're just not lining up very well. Business planning, only 6%. That doesn't seem to line up very well. Acquiring new customers, 31%. Okay, all right. So that's a high paying value index activity, acquiring new customers, and actually quite a few tech companies are actually incentivizing that and rewarding that behavior. We're going to give you more points, more SPFs, more rebates, more business credits, what have you, whatever form your reward takes for acquiring new customers. That one lines up. And upselling, cross-selling, 14%, not so much. But the one that really stands out is that one at the top. If the sales cycle is so important, so valuable and yet so, you know, painful in terms of what you're getting. Why is so little being invested to improve that capability? So we also ask, what are you incentivizing, right? So you can see here on the right, well, 42% are incentivizing customer satisfaction results, 39% developing leads and developing opportunities, 36% on market targeting, 31%, as you can see, acquiring new customers. So that is one of the top 6. So it was one of our top PBIs, and it's one of the top 6 that they're actually doing. So good alignment in terms of, of mapping, you know, what your investment is with what you want your channel partners to be doing. All right. Now, some of these actually are high on the value scale, right? So I've outlined them in blue. They're not high on the pain scale, right? So they don't show up on our PVI list on the left, right? But they are valuable. So what does that mean? That means that you're investing a lot in terms of incentivizing and rewarding performance for that particular function, and you're getting it, right? It's valuable, it's not painful. It's not painful because you're investing to, to, uh, to reward your partners to make sure they're performing well. So they are delivering on customer satisfaction results, they are delivering on developing opportunities into closed deals, and they are delivering on acquiring new customers, right? So that's why you don't see them on the, on the PDI list on the left. Let's talk about manufacturing next. Now you might think manufacturing is a lot like tech, but remember manufacturing is an inventory-laden industry, whereas tech, particularly with respect to so many of tech solutions, tech products having moved to the cloud, has really moved largely to a virtual inventory model where, you know, most of the manufacturing are still producing physical goods that have to be moved from, from the manufacturer's plants to the distributor's warehouses to ultimately the customer sites. So there are some differences. So let's look first what manufacturers consider to be the functions they value the most from their channel partners, right? Whether they be dealers, distributors, manufacturers' reps, contractors. And so product knowledge and selling particular products top the list. And not surprising, given that products are the essence of manufacturers. What may be a little surprising though is that product knowledge didn't show as high on the tech industries list. Now it was number 6, but it's, you know, much higher, in fact, than number 1 in terms of manufacturing. So following closely in the wake of product knowledge, though, developing leads into opportunities, specific market targeting, customer support, and inventory management. Now, some of these we saw in the tech industry examples, right? We saw product knowledge, we saw specific market targeting. We did not see some of the others, right? Inventory management. Again, You're going to see inventory management because manufacturing again is an inventory-laden industry. So you're going to see some similarities and some differences between the various industries. Let's look at what is most unsatisfactory. You know, so manufacturers' biggest pain points with respect to their channel partners. Well, topping the list is visibility into their partners' business performance KPIs. Now, this doesn't really surprise me because I've seen many a distributor and dealer refuse to share any information with their manufacturer suppliers. Indeed, many distributors think of themselves as the manufacturer's customer, and unfortunately, as a result, some manufacturers come to think of their distributors as their customers, and they lose sight of the full supplier channel customer value chain. That's another topic for another time. But this high value for KPI visibility is heartening to me. It's showing that manufacturers are starting to think more broadly about their market and their ecosystem. Following KPIs then comes sales forecasting, inventory management, brand compliance, Lead registration, customer support. Wait, haven't we seen inventory management and customer support for— oh yes, as a highly valued function on the previous slide. Well, combining the pain level then with the value, you might expect to see them high in the PVAI list, and you would be right. Inventory and management and customer support show up high on the manufacturer's PVI scale, but even more so do KPI visibility and brand compliance. So let's look at how manufacturers' incentivization strategies line with their PVIs. As with tech, not very well. Manufacturers today are really keen on having visibility into their partners' business performance KPIs, right? High value, a lot of pain associated with it, but high value. But the reality is that manufacturers are pretty unsatisfied with what they get. So it yields a very high, high PBI number, yet only 11% of manufacturers reward their channel partners for providing that visibility. Brand compliance and customer support are in pretty much the same boat. Highly valued, very painful, which is certainly not reflected in the, reflected in the incentivization numbers, only 18% and 16% respectively. The one that does make sense here is customer support. You can see that it shows up high in the list of functions that manufacturers are incentivizing. In fact, number 3. So Just like, you know, with Tech, there seems to be only a little bit of alignment in this case of customer support. But, you know, what are they incentivizing their channel partners to do? Well, rewarding particular products, developing leads into opportunity, customer support, etc. And you may recall that those three, along with number six, specific market targeting, as being highly valued by manufacturers. So it was high on value, but it didn't show up on the pain scale. So, again, because they don't show up on the pain scale, they don't show up in our PVI index. PVI is a combination of painful and valuable. And the bottom line is that the only PVI which aligns to manufacturing's incentive strategy is customer support. They're missing the boat on the other PBIs. That is, they should be considering them as opportunities, right? KPI visibility, brand compliance, and inventory management are opportunities for manufacturers to look at very closely to make a business impact on their bottom line. Okay, now let's turn to consumer goods companies. So you think that consumer goods companies, when it comes to what they see as valuable and what they see as painful, are more like tech or manufacturing? Well, if you said a little bit of both, you'd be right. Like tech, consumer goods companies value customer support, the sales cycle, and customer satisfaction very highly. And like manufacturers, consumer goods companies value customer support and inventory management. But at the top of their list, which is unique from tech and manufacturing, is partner engagement. That is, how frequently and how deeply do their distributors and retailers engage with them. In fact, it's another 100-percenter. Again, The first time— this is the first study in over 20 years of research that I've seen anything show up as a 100% across-the-board response. So 100% consumer goods companies, every single respondent in our study indicated that partner engagement held a high value for them. Then rounding out the most valued channel partner functions, this would be their distributors, their retailers, their dealers. Right, is brand compliance, which is a natural imperative for consumer goods companies. And the most painful— look at what tops the list. Like tech, channel partners' management, how they manage the sales cycle, or mismanage the sales cycle, I should say, is paramount, right? And sales cycle management in the consumer goods context has really to do with how distributors are managing the sales cycle with retailers. Replenishment and seasonality are key for consumer goods, and those consumer goods companies need their distributors to be at the top of their game. Otherwise, inventory costs can skyrocket and the supply chain can get all out of whack. So along with the sales cycle, consumer goods companies are feeling the pain with respect to partner success or lack thereof in opportunity development in acquiring new customers. So factoring consumer goods companies' channel dissatisfaction together with what they value the most gives us the PDI for consumer goods. Now you might have been surprised to know that the length of management of the sales cycle is number 1, but when you think about how fragile their supply chain is it becomes readily apparent. And you could chalk opportunity development and acquiring new customers up to the economic pressures that consumer goods companies and retailers, their channel partners, are feeling. Unless you're in the toilet paper or hand sanitizer business today. But the problem is that many consumer goods distributors think of their retailer customers as their book of business. Like insurance agents do their customers. Their idea of expanding their market footprint— this is distributors— is to sell more stuff to their base, not to expand their base. And selling more stuff to their base really translates into picking up another consumer goods product lines. So it makes— has no benefit to a particular consumer goods company when their distributor channel partners are adopting a strategy to expand their base by selling more stuff as opposed to expanding their footprint to new customers. So any incentive dissonance in the consumer goods industry? Yeah, how does— so how do the asks of their channel partners line up with how they incentivize them? Well, here's the top 5: length management, sales cycle, opportunity development, acquiring new customers. It's pretty obvious that the answer is no when it comes to, in particular, managing the sales cycle and acquiring new customers, right? Only 16% and 5%, respectively, of companies are really pushing for these desired attributes compared to a pretty big 37% that are rewarding channel partners for providing customer support excellence. And what are they incentivizing them for? So the— on the right again is what they're actually doing today. Uh, does that map up with what they say is most valuable and most painful for them? Well, it certainly does in terms of customer support. That's the only match. But again, if we factor in the other highly valued functions that consumer goods have of their distributors, their retailers, and their dealers, you know, they're already incentivizing for that, and they're getting good value. They're getting good performance. So they don't show up high on the, on the pain, the pain aspect of the, of the P, Pain Value Index. Right? But the, you can see that they're, they're missing out. If you go back to the left, they're really missing out, particularly on the management sales cycle and acquiring new customers, of targeting those as those, you know, primary moving parts, if you will, that they should be focused on to improve their channel partners' performance. The— so that's it for tech, manufacturing, consumer goods. You saw that there was a lot of misalignment between what those companies are actually doing and what they identify as being most valuable and most, most valuable to them and most painful for them in terms of the, the result and performance. And you would think that they should line up better. So we will, we'll give you a prescription at the end of what, what you should be doing if you're one of those three industries. But I wanted to also share with you a comparative look at the 3 industries in terms of how they, how they do certain things or consider certain things in the channel. So, you know, we ask, do you consider your channel partners to be loyal or not loyal? So the percentage of companies that consider their channel partners to be not loyal, you can see here, tech 29%, are not loyal. Manufacturing, 42% are not loyal. Consumer goods, 44% are not loyal. Those are all big numbers. They are big numbers, right? They are acutely big for manufacturing consumer goods. You do not want disloyalty, particularly in a time like we, uh, we are having right now. Loyalty, loyalty pays. When, when, uh, when things, um, when things get constrained. And the loyalty numbers are not looking very good for any of the industries. So, not satisfied with it. How many are not satisfied with their channel partner's growth? Well, again, pretty high numbers. I mean, I was— would be hoping that would be in the single digits, but no, we're always, you know, we're seeing anywhere from over a quarter to a third of companies not being satisfied with their channel partners' growth. We asked, do you have an incentive program, right? Are you doing anything to address those, those activities, those functions, those capabilities, those results that you find to be valuable or find to be, you know, painful, that you want to improve? And, you know, here a good number of them, of companies are. That, that was encouraging. Now I'll tell you one big difference in just the last few years is that the tech industry had a big lead on manufacturing consumer goods. Manufacturers in consumer goods seem to have woken up in the past few years and are knowing where to lay their channel investments in the form of an incentive program and getting on board with investing to make their, to get their channel partners performing the way they want them to perform. Number of incentives per year. So I found this was interesting. Tech, they typically run 14 incentive programs per year for their channel partners. Manufacturing, only 5. Consumer goods, 22. So, you know, quite a few for tech and consumer goods in particular, not so many in manufacturing. Manufacturers might look to, you know, scale that up. And we ask about channel partners' participation. How many of your channel partners actually participate in the programs that you make available to them? And you can see the numbers here. It's not very high. So with tech, it's just a little over half. And it's well under half for manufacturing and just under half for consumer goods. I want to point something out here to you. So when you look at the participation numbers, tech has the best. None of these are something that you want to write home about, uh, or to rave about, but tech has the best participation numbers. Okay, tech also has the best loyalty and growth numbers at the top. There's a correlation between these two, right? The higher participation in the programs that companies are offering their channel partners is leading to much better numbers in terms of channel partner loyalty and channel partners' revenue growth, right? So participation is, is at the key there. I wanted to finally share with you what companies are doing in terms of technology. So we said about, you know, 80% of companies, 75 to 80% of companies now are employing incentive program. Well, how are you running that incentive program, right? So we asked tech companies. Here is the answer that we get back. So 20% are running it on the backs of a spreadsheet, 58%, the majority, on custom-built systems, only 3% are using a commercial software product or platform, and 19% are outsourcing that incentive program to be managed by a digital agency. In manufacturing, here's how it breaks down for manufacturers. So 27% are running on a spreadsheet. That's quite a bit more. 63% are custom built. Commercial software product, 5%. That's about the same. As you find in tech, and only 5% really are outsourcing to an agency. So certainly not as much agency outsourcing in the manufacturing sector as there is in high tech. And consumer goods, finally, you know, spreadsheets, 37%. That's a much bigger number. 53%, okay, are custom built. None are using a commercial software product approach to support their incentive programs. And 10% are using an agency, okay. We also asked them in relation to what type of technology approach they're taking to supporting their strategic incentive and loyalty programs, we asked them how satisfied are you with that technology approach, right, or how dissatisfied are you. So 28%, more than one-fourth of tech companies, and this is the channel, the channel execs and the channel professionals that are using these technologies day in and day out, over a quarter of them are unhappy with the technology approach that, that their companies are taking. In manufacturing, the numbers even higher, 42%. Are unhappy with the technology approach that their companies are taking to fuel their incentive program. Consumer goods, more than half, 53%. This is an alert number, right? This is an alert number that as important as it is and has become for many companies to guide their channel partners' behavior in order to get the results performance and the results that they want, they are not taking the right technology approach to do so according to, again, the channel professionals that are using that technology to manage those programs. So in summary, you know, it is clear while there is some PVI commonality across industries, there are many PVIs that are unique to tech, manufacturing, and consumer goods. It's also clear that across all industries, there is major misalignment between what companies want their channel partners to do and what they are incentivizing or rewarding them to do. So there needs to be some reshuffling of incentive programs, strategies, and priorities, right? For tech companies, this may look something like this, right? What they're currently doing is on the left, and, you know, what the reshuffle would look like would be on the right. So you, you keep those things that you highly value. Your incentive program's working there. It's highly valued. They're performing. They're performing because you're incentivizing them. Keep that. You know, customer sat results is important to you, highly valued. Keep it in your incentive program. But think about Think about, you know, inserting, you know, or allocating some of that investment into guiding your channel partners' behavior to better management of the sales cycle, you know, to higher performing business planning, into more effective upselling and cross-selling, right? In manufacturing, you would put the emphasis, you would put more emphasis on the sales cycle business planning and upselling behavior. I'm sorry. So in manufacturing, you would keep the things that are working here, product sales, lead development, customer support, market targeting, but you would up your investment in incentivizing your channel partners to provide visibility into their business performance and in providing brand compliance. And for consumer goods, you would take the opportunity to reduce your supply chain costs significantly by as much as 10%, we found in our, in our research, by incentivizing distributors to be more attuned to improving the sales cycle, developing more opportunities, and acquiring new customers. That's going to be a big difference maker for consumer goods companies. So as I noted a few slides back, it's clear that partner loyalty and partner growth correlate strongly with incentive program participation. Okay, so how do you get higher participation? The answer: by innovating. Competition gamification, attributional goal targeting, developmental sequencing, employing countdown timers, or using the Hawthorne effect. I could go on, but these are advanced topics, some of them which we've covered on past webinars, others which I could talk about with you one-on-one, and others which we cover in our Incentive Academy workshops. But the bottom line is that if you are using the same old incentive programs quarter after quarter, year after year, you are, in addition to not developing your channel partners' skills and capabilities, you're losing their attention and their interest and ultimately their loyalty and their business. And finally, you can see, you, you saw the effect of the spreadsheet, of using the spreadsheet as a technology solution to manage these programs which need to be highly adaptable, highly scalable, and, you know, factor in the innovation capabilities that I talked about in the previous point. Right? You know, we saw that consumer goods has a heightened use of spreadsheets compared to the other two industries, manufacturing and tech. And a much higher dissatisfaction number with respect to that technology approach. What's obvious is that you need to move away from spreadsheets, what I've been counseling for years and what a lot of companies are now taking to heart. So with that, let me turn it back to Lauren and see if there were any questions that came in on the chat while I was talking.

Yeah, Tim, thank you. Let's see, we have a few minutes left. For a couple of questions. All right, this one is from Aaron. This is all fascinating stuff. What else is covered in the research study you did, and how can I get access to it?

Okay, yeah, we, we— so I, um, I covered what we covered today. It's probably about half of what we, we, uh, we got from the research study. So we went into a lot more detailed issues about You know, what are the levels of investment? How much are you investing in your incentive program for particular functions? If you are employing an agency, what is your agency spend on an annual basis? We also ask broader questions like, do you have a PRM system or a partner portal? You know, if you do, what sort of technologies are you using about it? So a lot more information in the research study, and we'll be actually be publishing the research report next month, and we'll let everyone know when that is available, you know, from Fielo.

All right, great. And I want to squeeze this one in as well. This one is from Michael. You gave good reason to fear the spreadsheet. We gave up on that approach years ago when we exceeded 500 channel partners, but our homegrown system is now running on fumes, antiquated by today's standards, pretty much impossible to change. Can you speak more to the agency and commercial software approaches?

Yeah, so it's, it's a good question. So agencies and commercial software. So oftentimes agencies are actually using commercial software. They, they may not advertise that they're doing that, but they are oftentimes the user of a commercial software platform, you know, doing it for you. I think the advantages that agencies have is in incentive program design or loyalty program design aspects, right? When I talked about the fact if you want growth and loyalty that you have to, you know, you're going to have to be more innovative. I think that's one of the values that an agency brings to you, that innovative thinking. Now, over time, you know, I think you would like to see that innovative thinking, you know, as it applies to how you are strategically incentivizing your channel to transfer, uh, you know, internally. So, you know, I have seen companies that start off employing agencies, uh, and after a few years have accumulated so much, you know, knowledge and perspective themselves that they wind up bringing it in-house. So I think that the agency question is you know, best answered about looking internally of what your own, you know, skills are in terms of incentive program strategy and design. Now, you can also bring in, as opposed to outsourcing it to an agency, you can bring in, you know, a consultant to work with you for, you know, 2 or 3 or 6 months to bring that knowledge in-house much faster. Commercial software product, like I said, a lot of agencies are using commercial software products or commercial software platforms in the background without perhaps letting you know. But commercial software product technology in the incentive automation space, which actually, again, as an industry analyst researcher, I had been covering for, you know, close to 20 years, I think has matured tremendously just in the last few years. You know, across the board. So in terms of usability, in terms of breaking down what is really quite a sophisticated process into simple discrete steps that can each be managed by a particular user or role, you know, essentially making, you know, loyalty program management or incentive program management simple. So simplifying it. And then adding in the scalability factors, so a lot of the commercial software product vendors, including Fialo, you know, are built on a scalable cloud computing platform. In Fialo's case, it's the Salesforce platform, which I think everyone knows is, along with being very scalable, also of course very secure and very reliable. So come a long way in the last few years. And whether it's something that you decide to, you know, insource yourself or outsource to an agency, I mean, if you are going to look to an agency because you don't think you have the requisite skills right now to, you know, be doing that sort of creating design and communications management with your channel partners, then you can, you should at least be asking the agency about the technology approach that they are employing.

Great, thank you, Tim, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today's webinar, but if we did not get to your question, we'll make sure to do so through email after the webinar concludes. If you'd like to learn more about Fielo or any of Fielo's products, please visit us at fielo.com. Thank you.