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March 15, 2019
Are You Growing Your Channel Partners through Symbiotic Relationships?
By: SBI
As a sales leader, you are always looking for the most optimal route to your customers. When designed & executed correctly, channel partners provide your business an incredible amount of leverage. Correctly managed channel partners can help you expand into new geographies, break into new industries or customer segments, and cover fragmented marketplaces. Conversely, an ill-managed program will result in decreased margins, channel conflict, confuse your customers, and put your business in jeopardy.
Download the Partner Prioritization Tool. This tool helps evaluate channel partners based on objective metrics, sets the foundation for continued measurement, and can be used to hold joint-strategy sessions with partners.
In order to understand the available options, we’re going to start with a brief overview of the more popular types of channel partners. It is important to understand the different business models of each partner type to understand how much influence you will have in the relationship.
Partners that make more margin on services sold on top of your product care less about the actual product. Resellers that don’t provide services will be more reliant on your product to differentiate in the market. Each type serves a slightly different market and provides you with coverage to more end customers (click here for additional information/other types of channel partners):
Managing the many routes to the customer is a complicated endeavor, for the remainder of this article we are going to focus on the most common types; Value-Added Resellers & Resellers / Distributors.
A couple key points to consider while creating your channel partner program:
Develop Your Channel Program from the Viewpoint of Your Channel Partners
In other words, think of your channel partners similar to how you think of your own sales reps. What will they need to know about your product, what behaviors do you want to drive, and how will you hold them accountable to agreed upon objectives?
Not All Your Partners Are Created Equal
In order to properly motivate your channel partners and make the most use of your limited time, it is important to prioritize your channel partners (and example prioritization tool can be found here).
Common partner segmentation programs are labeled in a similar manner as hotel & airline affinity programs; Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Member. Creating tiers not only provides incentives to sell more, it serves to protect your top partners.
Programs vary across companies and industries, but the most common benefits include:
Illustration of Potential Benefits by Tier:
Prioritizing your partners and providing the requisite benefits not only helps you manage your time effectively, but the tiered benefits structure motivates partner to grow with you!
Why Can’t You Afford to Neglect Your Channel Partners?
In today’s environment your competitors will always be trying to reach your customers. Very few (if any) companies have the scale to reach all customers & prospects with their direct sales teams (nor should they). Many end customers even prefer to buy through a trusted channel partner vs purchasing directly. Indirect channel partners fill this gap, enabling you to effectively & efficiently reach previously inaccessible segments of your market.
Download the Partner Prioritization Tool. This tool helps evaluate channel partners based on objective metrics, sets the foundation for continued measurement, and can be used to hold joint-strategy sessions with partners.
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