Michiel, what can you tell us about ChannelEngine?

ChannelEngine is a Dutch B2B company with international operations, which offers a platform to easily connect to over 700 marketplaces and online sales channels. We solve the greatest challenges of modern e-commerce with advanced tooling and automations that make it easier for businesses to grow.

Our platform allows retailers and brands to access more channels, and optimize every sale, through the largest selection of connected marketplaces and an extensive ecosystem of partners at our disposal.

They use our platform to sell over 11 million different products across more than 700+ sales channels worldwide on a platform that is highly automated and integrated with their systems thus providing incredible value to shops, marketplaces, partners, and clients.

This sounds absolutely amazing! What role does the extensive ecosystem of partners you mentioned play in the organization?

Perhaps one of the most important roles! We rely greatly on our partners to facilitate our clients so we can offer comprehensive products and services. We have integration and technology partners, which we work with to create connectors that enable seamless operational processes between our and their e-commerce platforms as well as logistics partners that enable our clients to fulfill deliveries to the final customer.

We have created an extensive partner ecosystem to provide more value to our clients as e-commerce dominates the globe and takes an even bigger share of the retail market. We might have startups in remote areas of the world making and offering wonderful products but needing the ability to fulfill deliveries while reducing costs. This is where our partners and we join forces to create the trodden path for our clients.

Wonderful! How are you managing the communication and client handling between ChannelEngine and its partners?

We have used Kiflo PRM for the past couple of years to provide our partners with a portal for them to be able to view the latest information on our offers and track their activity on lead submissions and lead nurturing. We also use HubSpot to manage the deals with our clients. One of the very important aspects of our operations was to have those two systems well integrated so that we can start the partner recruiting process in HubSpot and seamlessly move over to Kiflo when it’s time to onboard partners.

There is another very important aspect – tracking the leads and deals sent between our partners and ChannelEngine. We needed an integration that was able to start the process in one system, continue in another and then complete the process in a completely different system altogether. In order for us to achieve this we needed not only a tight integration between all systems but a flexible way to manage the process flow.

We asked Kiflo to perform the necessary integrations and they introduced us to one of their integration partners – CoMantis.

What were your first impressions about the team at CoMantis and what is your overall feeling about the success of the project?

They are a young sales and automation agency which are very flexible in the way they operate. They provided us with a quote for a list of tasks that we needed to be done but as time went by, the tasks changed and we needed more resources as well as to move resources around different tasks. We work with the same systems such as Slack for direct communication and ClickUp for daily task management so it was very easy for us to get synced and start the work without the need for extensive onboarding.

CoMantis team members are professional consultants and hands on integrators that have extensive experience in building and integrating apps with different systems so the value they provide is not only in terms of verbal consultations but they actually implement the integration or the automation that solves the issue we are experiencing. They listen to the challenges we face and brainstorm with us on ideas that best suit our needs while utilizing as much as possible from our existing tech stack.

We hope to continue not to disappoint! Could you tell us in short what are some of the challenges that you were facing at ChannelEngine?

Being a global company does require a different perspective when building the digital infrastructure and database. For example, as an international company with partners all over the globe, we need to be able to track the leads that are submitted by different partners. This is tied not only to the commissions they receive but also to the fact that a lead can be submitted by two different partners and we need to be able to see that in real time and address it very quickly so that partners understand the situation.

Another challenge that we are facing is identifying the key team members of partners that are changing jobs between partners. Sometimes a partner team member will leave one partner and join another but that partner team member has performed really well in the past therefore we’d like to keep our eye on them for possible business relations in the future.

Last but definitely not the least – the workflows. As I mentioned, we use HubSpot as our corporate CRM and we need to be able to receive the lead in HubSpot but also manage it transparently in Kiflo PRM – and the data in both systems needs to be identical at the end of the process. We achieved this by using Zapier and HubSpot workflows to provide additional flexibility at the critical points in the workflow.

Excellent! What are the plans for the near future for ChannelEngine?

We are a company with global operations but our everyday internal operations are also very dynamic. We are constantly optimizing our operational processes to achieve higher efficiency which provides us with the competitive edge that we need in the current competitive and fluctuating market.

And in order to maintain a higher level of value than the competition, we need to be able to optimize not only internal expenses but also to find new ways to work with our partners to deliver more value to our clients and their customers.

Our main focus this year is to make sure we are well equipped to handle future challenges and this involves us becoming even more flexible and offering a wider range of solutions when it comes to working with our partners and delivering higher value to the market. Having the right vendors by our side in such turbulent times is vital for the achievement of our goals and we are happy that we have built such a relationship with CoMantis.

Thank you for the kind words, Michiel!