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This is Carolyn Bradfield and you\u2019re listening to the Convey Micro-Cast audio series. \xa0

This week is our Halloween Micro-Cast series and we\u2019re going to give our old friend Freddy Krueger a shout out by entitling our program, the Nightmare on Channel Street.\xa0 For those of you who don\u2019t remember Freddy, he starred as a character in the Nightmare on Elm street, an insane child killer, released on a technicality and murdered by the town\u2019s parents.\xa0 He comes back in people\u2019s dreams and continues to kill through 9 different movies.

So in honor of Halloween week, we are going to identify nightmares in the channel that keep you up at night, ruin your channel program and destroy revenue.

Our first episode in the Nightmare on Channel Street is called \u201cthe death of commissions\u201d.

This episode of unfolds as nervous channel partners watch in horror as big companies gobble up smaller ones, creating a behemoth that lumbers through the marketplace like a zombie trying to feed itself on dwindling sales with a pack of hungry debt holders hard on their heels.\xa0 \xa0

The struggling company darts into court to protect itself from hungry debt holders by filing bankruptcy and then the nightmare really begins, but not for the company, instead for partners that sold its services.\xa0 A new group of characters come on the scene, the bankruptcy court judges who nullify partner contracts gasping in horror at the commissions flowing out the door to partners who stopped selling their services years ago.\xa0 Judges rule, commissions begin to die and partners that depended on them start scrambling for new sources of revenue.

Episode two is called the \u201cThe Invasion of the Sales Partner Snatchers\u201d

You used to go to Channel Partners in Vegas and there were thousands of partners in the exhibit hall, or to regional meetings full of partners.\xa0 Then, all of a sudden, there was the invasion of the body snatchers and one by one those partners started disappearing, seemingly snatched away, gone forever.\xa0

Where did the partners go?\xa0 Some of them got discouraged with channel sales and went back to their careers working for a company.\xa0 Some of them simply aged out and retired from active duty, continuing to take whatever commission checks that were still coming their way. \xa0 Or some of them just decided that it was not interesting enough to keep coming back, only to hear the same old presentations delivered the same way.\xa0 And the other explanation for their disappearance is that pods from outer space have landed in the channel, snatching up the partners we used to know and depend on.

In Episode three, vendors check into the Bates Motel, hand over their MDF funds and may never have their channel marketing budget come out alive.

Your Vegas hotel, those huge greens fees at the golf tournament, or sponsorships for that expensive cocktail party have been washed down the drain with very few partners that you hoped would engage actually selling your services.\xa0 Now, you wake up in a cold sweat being chased by your management team, screaming that you don\u2019t know what the ROI result is, and which partners were converted and what revenue is going to result from your efforts.

Next it\u2019s a cold Halloween night and you\u2019re waiting in the Pumpkin Patch for the Great Pumpkin to arrive.\xa0 But that never happens because you\u2019re in episode 4 of the Nightmare on Channel Street.

If you worry about trying to find partners to represent you in the channel, only to have your trick or treat bag filled with rocks, then you are not alone.\xa0 The channel has expanded, the number of vendors has grown, and it\u2019s much harder to get partners to pay attention with all of the noise in the channel.\xa0 Trying to get people to pay attention to you can be one of the nightmares on Channel Street.

And our fina