Overview of Channel Sales Roles

Channel sales involves a channel organization working to recruit channel partners and sell the channel organization's products and services through these partners to grow their business.

Both channel organizations and their partners use partner relationship management functionality to align their business practices so that they can more successfully close deals. Channel organizations can also use the functionality to analyze partner performance, thus optimizing their time and financial investments in their partners.

Channel Sales Job Roles

Job roles provide users with access to different functions and data so they can accomplish their jobs. Channel sales utilizes several distinct job roles to accomplish these goals.

The following table lists the job roles involved with channel sales and provides a description of the general responsibilities of each role.

Job Role Name	Job Role Description
Channel Operations Manager	Manages programs and business processes to improve the productivity of the channel sales team and their channel partners in context of the partner relationship management functionality. This role is also responsible for developing metrics and reports to track and measure the success of the overall channel business.
Channel Account Manager	Manages the business relationship between a channel partner and the brand owner. This role is responsible for planning and supporting collaborative sales, marketing, and business processes designed to increase partner productivity and engagement.
Channel Sales Manager	Manages and monitors the activities and the performance of the channel account managers.
Partner Administrator	Manages the company's profile and controls the users and their access to the channel organization's applications. This role is also responsible for maintaining and ensuring the company is leveraging partner programs and incentives that best suit their specific business needs.
Partner Sales Manager	Manages and monitors the activities and the performance of the partner sales representatives. This role is also responsible for managing key planning tools and programs. This roles also manages business plans and marketing development funds.
Partner Sales Representative	Manages the sales relationship between the channel partner and the customer, and is primarily responsible for selling the brand owner's products or services. This role leverages functionality such as lead and opportunity management, and deal registration to maximize sales productivity.
Application Implementation Consultant/Sales Administrator	Responsible for initial implementation and configuration. Manages sales and business processes to improve productivity of the sales team.

Access Groups and Access Extension Rules

Job roles provide users with access to different functions and data. In addition to job roles, you can use access groups to provide sales resources with additional access to sales object data. Access groups are an alternative way of granting data permissions to users. You use access groups to supplement the data access users receive through their job roles and other security mechanisms.

There are two types of access groups: custom access groups and system access groups. Custom access groups are groups you create to provide users with access to data according to the needs of your business. System access groups, meanwhile, are access groups that Oracle creates for you.

You can use access groups with these objects:

• Partner

  If you have secured partners using access groups, then that same access automatically includes the partner contacts belonging to the partner. This means that all members of an access group with access to a specific partner can automatically access that partner's contacts.

• Deal Registration

• MDF Budget

• MDF Request

• MDF Claim

• Program Enrollment

Note:

Access groups grant access to data, but users must also have the corresponding functional privileges to access objects.

Meanwhile, just as access groups give users access to sales object data, access extension rules give users access to related object data. This extended access greatly simplifies security configuration. For example, if you have secured access to an object such as Partner using access groups, then you can create an access extension rule to extend the access defined for the Partner object to a related object, such as Deal Registration. All members of an access group who can access the Partner data will then have the same access to Deal Registration data.

Using access extension rules, you can extend access group security defined on these objects to their related objects:

• Partner

• MDF Budget

• MDF Request

Note:

Many objects support the use of access groups for data security, including the Product object. When using access groups with the Product object, note that it could result in a situation where users working with deal registrations might not have access to one, or even all, of the products included in those deals. In such cases, users can still remove such products from a deal registration, modify product attributes in the deal registration, and copy or approve the deal registration. However, if users don't have access to a product, then they can't add it to a deal registration.

To learn more about using access groups, see the topics in the Related Topics section.