Making Your Partner Channel Roar With Success

Expanding your sales through channel partners is a great way to achieve success. It is a tried and tested strategy that has been the foundation of many companies success.

But channel sales is far more complicated than many people first believe, it is far harder than just getting some other companies to want to sell your services. You will need to create an invigorated, active, third party sales function where you no longer have direct control over the customer messaging and relationship. It will be scary; it will be bloody hard work.

But it will be worth it.

Setting up Your Channel Program

When they are up and running, your channel will bring you fantastic business, but there is a lot to consider when setting up your channel. Get it wrong, and you can end up in a tricky and potentially expensive mess to rectify, so getting it right the first time is crucial to timely success.

Process

It's a boring bit, but the success of your partner channel will include great order fulfilment, support, training, billing and usually much more.

We will set up cross-department processes that consider all conflicting priorities and remove the internal politics that often can hold back success.

Service Catalogue

Working out what your channel can and should sell and what margins will make it attractive for you and them is never as simple as it first seems.

Our team can help you focus your efforts on the products and services your partners will want to sell and the market is waiting for.

Partner Recruitment

Winning your first new channel partners requires time and effort; scaling this becomes as hard as winning direct clients.

Creating partner recruitment campaigns and managing them is something we have experience with for over 20 years. Let us help you get the right partner's first time.

Sales Enablement

Once recruited, you need to get the partners selling. They will need training and sales collateral as the absolute minimum.

Our team can help you create training and onboarding programs, ready to go out of box sales campaigns and get you new partners selling faster than possible in-house.

Engaging Your Channel Partners

Never is the 80-20 rule more visible than in channel. The only problem is you never know which 20% of partners will deliver 80% of the business when you start. Many partners will include your services in their portfolio, but not every partner will deliver the business you need. There are ways to ensure that you maximise your partners' potential and ensure that your efforts and resources are focused on where the results will come from.

Coms

You need to stay in your channel partners' minds; you probably are just one of several companies they partner with. Communication is key.

From simple newsletters to multi-level engagement across the channel partners team, we can ensure that what you want and need to say is heard and understood.

Through Partner Marketing

Your channel partners are an extension to your own sales teams so give them the resources and love you would for your own sales teams. Don't expect them to sell off without your help.

Digital marketing, social media, and email marketing have a place to play, along with producing rebrandable collateral and traditional marketing resources.

Managing MDF

Incentivising salespeople will help drive sales. You may not have a big budget for this, but you need creative ways to keep in their minds.

Marketing development funds and Spiff will help your channel partners to focus on what you want them to sell. We can create and manage the programs to do this.

Alignment

Without a clear alignment of objectives, your efforts will be wasted. Understanding why selling your product or services will help them achieve their strategic business outcomes is essential.

We can hold focus groups with the relevant parties to explore the alignment and identify where the areas of non-productive friction need to be eliminated.

Driving Growth

You are unlikely to be key to your channel partners' overall success; you are just a tiny part of their business plan (unless you are a strategic partner), so you'll need to work to keep yourself in their hearts and minds. You can do many things to help drive continual growth from your partners.

Joint Campaigns

Pushing sales through your partners is a constant effort and getting them to prioritise your products and services over others means making life easy for them.

We can create joint campaigns, working with your partners' internal teams to deliver you the growth that you want to see.

Events

Selling is about getting in front of your audience; one of the best ways to do that is through events.

Events don't have to cost the earth; your partners may have venues that can be used. Getting people through the door takes more than an email invite. Following up on events is where success comes from.

Feedback

You cannot live within a bubble. Your sales figures are just a part of the picture. Selling through the channel distances you from your customers.

Creating effective feedback loops with the partners and the customers will help you make informed decisions. We can facilitate this feedback through surveys and focus groups, measuring sentiment as well as hard facts.

Customer Success

Customer experience is central to so many businesses' success. If you want to create the next unicorn, then you need to be putting your customers' experience at the heart of your business.

We can bring our proper understanding of customer success management and our years of experience to your company.

Marketing as a Service

Drive more growth and access additional revenue streams by offering Marketing as a Service to your channel partners. We will act as their marketing department, delivering complete agency services to bring your offerings to the front of their customers' minds.

High Value

Your partners will often not have access to any experienced internal marketing resources. Often we see companies leaving it to an intern or hoping someone will pick it up within the sales team.

Give them access to a highly experienced team who will over-deliver at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated in-house resource.

Low Cost

We can create unique packages for your partners, delivering exactly what is needed and only the services that will drive revenue.

You can choose to subsidise these services through your MDF.

Revenue Share

We can bill the client directly and give you an ongoing revenue share (typically 20%), or you can bill them directly.

We will never reveal the cost structure we use with you to the partner.

Joint Success

Providing your partners with added value and a desperately needed resource will be a win-win.

Your partners will benefit from more revenue, and so will you, and you will control how your message reaches the end customers.