Cavell’s Battle for Good Data on the Channel

The channel still represents one of the biggest growing opportunities for service providers and vendors alike to get their products to market. Cavell’s latest research shows that 47% of providers said that they are increasing the percentage of sales that go through channel partners in 2024. The challenge that all those companies selling through the channel face is identifying the right partners. With over 5000 active partners in the UK, it is difficult to find data on individual channel partners that is not outdated or incorrect.

Cavell frequently received requests from companies looking to identify new channel partners and undertake partner audits from vendors, distributors and service providers. After a particularly challenging audit involving over 1000 channel partners across Europe, Dom Black, Director of Growth at Cavell, recognised the need for a more efficient solution.

“Our clients look to us for these vital insights into what their channel is doing, like what vendors they are selling, or what services they are offering. We need to provide these insights, but the manual process was eating up far too much of our time, energy, and sanity.

In many of our audits, we found multiple partners no longer existed and many of them didn’t have any mention of the vendor or supplier on their website or were selling a competitor’s solution. This highlighted to us that not only was there no publicly available data out there, but also many suppliers were acting on incorrect or out of date data for one of their core GTM functions”

Cavell looked for a solution to this bad data in the market, but any company that we attempted to get this data from failed to deliver. We waded through a mire of outdated lists, event attendee lists, and databases of outdated contact information before we realised nothing in the market would properly meet our needs.

This challenge sparked the idea of leveraging new techniques using AI and web harvesting to automate the process, pulling live information from multiple online sources into one dashboard. The result is a fully automated platform that employs advanced data scraping and large language models to analyse channel partner websites and generate valuable insights.

The streamlined platform is an invaluable tool for prospecting new channel partners or expanding channel programs into new markets. Subscribers can search and filter channel partners by location, size, supported vendors, services offered, and more. This eliminates the need for manual website reviews or outdated lists, allowing channel managers and growth directors to find new opportunities, focus on relevant companies and optimise their efforts.

Finbarr Begley, Senior Analyst at Cavell, stated, “We are entering an era where intense manual research is becoming obsolete. As an analyst company, Cavell must lead this transformation. It is not enough to discuss AI and advanced data analysis; we must implement these tools ourselves. With this new database, customers can access regularly updated insights into key markets, evaluate vendor offerings, and assess a channel’s readiness to sell new products.”

Cavell drives fascinating insights from the data highlighting the state of the channel at the moment and opportunities that can be leveraged. Cavell’s latest enterprise study of 500 IT leaders in the UK showed that improving customer experiences was a key priority for businesses of all sizes, including the SME. Our Channel Insights service identified only 885 partners in the UK selling both UCaaS and CCaaS services. However, breaking this down further, 97% of CCaaS partners also sell UCaaS but only 26% of UCaaS partners sell CCaaS – representing a huge opportunity for partners specialising in UCaaS to move into the CCaaS space.

One customer using the tool realised that a large majority of their channel base was selling security products and leveraged that information to begin offering security integrations within their portfolio as their channel was equipped to sell them.

These sorts of insights are valuable to Cavell as an analyst company, but also help customers gain useful insights into the shape of the channel. This can help them determine how their channel targets overlap and what areas might make viable targets for expansion.

Ryan Tollofson, Director, Marketing & Emerging Services at TELUS states:

“Cavell has been an important partner for TELUS Partner Solutions, helping us to define and refine our go-to-market and portfolio strategies. Their Channel Insights tool has proven to be highly effective, enabling us to quickly identify and quantify specific market segments based on various relevant criteria. The support and responsiveness to feature requests from Cavell have significantly enhanced our trust in both the tool and the data it provides.”

Cavell’s Channel Insights tool is also a great platform for monitoring your own channel. By saving a list of your own channel partners you can review who is selling your competitors solutions, who is offering services that you don’t offer, or who might be good targets for new products you plan to release.

Dom Black is enthusiastic about the future of this tool. “We are just beginning this journey. Many AI techniques for research and data analysis are in their infancy, and our platform has an exciting roadmap that we eagerly anticipate sharing with our customers.

With many potential features such as translation, alerting, live-analysis and more in the pipeline, this new platform represents the start of Cavell’s journey into providing deep insights into the channel to its customers.

To learn more about the Cavell Channel Insights platform and schedule a demo, please contact Dom Black at Dom.Black@cavell.com

First published on Comms Dealer.