Channel sales partnerships must be symbiotic relationships between Vendors and Partners. Of course, in order to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, you need to invest time and effort to attract and retain high-performing channel sales Partners who are equally inclined to sell your solutions. 

One thing we’ve learned as we work with our clients every day to develop and execute effective strategies for communicating “To” and driving demand “Through” Channel Partners is a lack in being able to stand in each other’s shoes. A top concern we often uncover is that Vendors do not truly understand the key business drivers that motivate Partners to work with them. Sound familiar? Here's why opportunity, simplicity, and flexibility are critical to attracting and retaining quality partnerships. 

Opportunity 

At the end of the day, your Partners’ goals are the same as yours: to increase demand and revenue while decreasing costs and reducing capital expenditures. As the Vendor, it’s your job to help Partners increase customer engagement, satisfaction and retention. Help Partners optimize business opportunities by:

• Supporting Partners with tools and education to navigate modern sales and marketing landscapes. 
• Communicating exactly how the business outcomes you provide solve challenges for their customers and impacts their bottom line, including:
• Increase overall revenue and optimize business opportunities.
• Decrease capital expenditures and infrastructure costs.  
• Customer satisfaction and engagement. 
• Always-on service and business continuity. 
• Worker satisfaction and increase employee productivity.

Simplicity

Above all, Partners want to spend their time adding reliable value for their prospects and customers. That’s why it’s important to provide frictionless processes, systems, and automation that encourages Partners to focus on selling rather than worrying about complex program requirements, benefits, portals and so on. Tactics for simplifying and reducing complexity include:

• Communicate without bombarding by aligning relevant messaging and delivery with Partners’ specialization and preferences. 
• Provide ease of doing business by clearly presenting the goals, information, support, and resources they need, when they need them. 
• Eliminate unnecessary obstacles like multiple portals and rigid requirements.  

Flexibility

Partners commonly work with between 5 and 25 IT and telecom Vendors at any given time. So, not only does the experience need to be simple, it needs to fully align with Partners’ resources, business goals, specializations, and preferences. Your Channel Partners need to be able to educate prospects through tailored multimedia that can be easily personalized and shared in whatever way makes the most sense for their business.

One effective way to provide Partners with the flexibility they need to be successful is to enable them with customizable content and demand generation strategies. Many Vendors spend millions of dollars on through-channel demand gen tools and content creation that goes unused by Partners. Why? Because they lack the flexibility and customization Partners need to do through-channel demand generation the RIGHT WAY. Consider these best practices:

• Help Partners execute demand generation campaigns by leading with customizable multimedia content including video, webinars and podcasts.
• Encourage Partners to focus on content-based education and social selling strategies that support and supplement email, as part of an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
• Make prospect education easy by providing marketing content to fit their preferences/profile, and ready to promote any way they want.
• Ensure Partners remain compliant with CAN-SPAM laws, GDPR, CCPA or any future regulations by not requiring them to load contacts into multiple platforms.

Now is a great time to put yourself in your Partners’ shoes and assess your current channel sales strategy. Interested in talking more about key business drivers for Partners? Contact us anytime!