Any vendor knows that an effective channel partner strategy is the best way to increase a business’s sales.
By Chrystal Singh, channel sales manager at BitCo
The right partners, armed with the right distribution and sales expertise, can help a vendor’s revenues soar – yet maintaining these relationships effectively has long been a complex and time-consuming task. Finding ways to improve collaboration is vital to success, and in a hyper-competitive landscape, there are three areas your organisation can’t afford to ignore.
Support
In this age of cloud-based service delivery and increasingly comprehensive managed services, consumers expect greater levels of support than ever before – and “middleman” channel partners are often the primary way this is provided. It’s no surprise, then, that customer experience has become the chief competitive differentiator among businesses in all sectors, but particularly in fast-changing industries like tech and IT.
When considering the importance of timely and ongoing support in the channel partner relationship, it’s useful to remember that, at the end of the day, the support you offer is ultimately for the benefit of the end user, not your sales partners themselves.
When it comes to marketing, or after-sales care, for example, channel partners often won’t have in-house resources of their own, and will rely on materials, and training from the manufacturer or vendor.
As the vendor is the real expert on their own product, communicating with consistent messaging about its value in the business environment is equally the responsibility of the channel team and vendor.
Supplying up-to-date materials like marketing templates, product information, co-branded brochures and microsites is a perfect way to ensure consistent, brand-aligned messaging to the end user who will ultimately decide whether a product or service is adopted within their organisation.
This kind of support is a chief consideration in any channel partnership, and is central to not only the channel partner’s relationship with the client, but also their relationship with the vendor. In a highly competitive landscape, it often means the difference between a long-lasting, fruitful relationship and a stagnant, unproductive one.
Planning and training
For vendors and their channel partners to achieve real alignment of their business goals, engaging the right stakeholders in both organisations is critical.
Today, real results are driven by continuous knowledge transfer in multiple directions. Vendors are responsible for imparting sales knowledge to their channel partners, and for helping them convey the business value of products to end users. Effective training cannot be overemphasized, and could include practices like:
* Live workshops for new product launches;
* Regular delivery of training materials and content;
* E-Learning strategies; and
* Inviting continual feedback through surveys and face-to-face sessions.
With the right approach, training can become so much more than just a sales function. It can help to engage and retain partners, reduce support costs, create new revenue streams, improve performance, and provide invaluable data that can be mined for insights about how your partners – and their customers – experience your brand.
Feedback
Keeping partners engaged and informed on product updates and business changes is essential to ensuring they’re as informed as they need to be when they engage their customers – but how can feedback from customers themselves be incorporated into an effective channel partner strategy? It’s time to digitize.
Surveys and emails are only the beginning in a business landscape increasingly driven by data and the insights it can provide if applied correctly.
Speed is key. Who can afford to wait months for client feedback when competitors have access to the same information in real-time? With a constant stream of feedback, your business will have an up-to-date snapshot of your sales pipeline, the status of promising leads, the ROI on your marketing spend, the performance of each distributor, and much more.
Spotty or incomplete feedback about sales performance has long been an inescapable norm in channel partnerships. With the clever use of data, however, you can improve your service levels, your sales process, and your business’s revenue simultaneously.
It’s the strength of your channel partnerships, not how many you have, that can make or break your revenue goals. And, of course, it will always be more budget-friendly to retain and grow existing partnerships than to constantly be forming new ones. It’s quality, not quantity, after all, that can ultimately spell success or failure.