How to Keep Your Channel Partners Engaged and Motivated
Understanding that channel partners want simplicity, speed and service will keep those relationships alive and functioning.
Having a solid relationship with your channel partner is integral for success. Simply put, while in the past channel partners may have been able to sell products based on vendor strength alone, customers are demanding more, and partners are finding it necessary to create their own value propositions to sell products.
As a security resale partner, then, it’s your job to keep your channel partners engaged and exciting about selling your vendor’s products. With a few simple best practices, you can keep them motivated, happy and willing to sell your products.
1. Provide Meaningful Incentives
Promotions and incentives can boost business, but only when they are meaningful to your partners — and they actually know about them. Make it easy for your channel partners to locate and identify the promotions that are available to them and communicate these incentives early and often.
Your partners should not have to search for a relevant Cisco promotion, for instance, when building a quote for a client. Ideally, the promotions should be automatically integrating into quoting tools, so that the partner is aware of the promotion and able to apply it to the deal, but at the very least, your team of resellers should have up-to-date information about current incentives and promotions at all times.
2. Give Excellent Service
Your channel partners rely on you for technical support, so it’s vital that you deliver excellent service. Delivering this excellent service relies in some part on your training efforts (more on that in a moment) so that your partners are able to develop appropriate solutions for customers that don’t require an inordinate amount of support.
One common issue with channel partners is a tendency to stretch products to the limit, which can inadvertently create support issues. The more this happens, the thinner that your support capabilities are stretched, and eventually service can suffer.
Therefore, not only do you need to focus on your own ability to provide support and have the tools and knowledge necessary to solve problems, but you need to have plans in place to reduce the need for tech support to start with. In the end, the happier that buyers are with their products, the happier they will be with your resellers, and the more loyal your resellers will be to you.
3. Provide the Right Training
As previously mentioned, providing adequate training to your reseller partners can go a long way toward reducing the problems that lead to disengagement. However, many channel partners complain of seemingly endless ongoing training.
Whenever new products are released, channel partners are excited about them and willing to sell them, but many don’t have the time or interest in spending days away from the office learning every single detail of these products. Often, the training is redundant, or the new products are essentially existing products with new features.
To keep your partners engaged, keep trainings focused on the “need to know” features and changes. Better yet, automate the quoting process or use guided selling software to help your partners make the right recommendations to customers quickly, without the need for endless trainings.
4. Make It Easy to Make Big Deals
It’s a simple fact: the easier you make it to sell your products, the more your channel partners will sell. However, if your partners have to rely on email updates or trainings to get pertinent information for making sales, the likelihood that they will upsell or cross sell decreases considerably.
You need to make it easy for them to sell, and that means putting the information that they need at their fingertips. An intuitive quoting platform that automatically suggests opportunities to increase the sale is ideal, but you can also help by creating selling guides and other tools that partners can use. If they are selling and making money, they will remain engaged.
As the security landscape changes and the way that businesses buy security solutions changes, it’s going to become even more important for vendors and their partners to keep resellers engaged. Understanding that they want simplicity, speed and service will keep those relationships alive and functioning.
Tiffany Rowe is a leader in marketing authority for Seek Visibility, contributing on behalf of ScanSource KBZ.
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