For many B2B companies, developing a successful channel partnership program is seen as an essential strategy for growth and long-term success. An effective channel partner program enables the recruitment of new partners while supporting ongoing relationships with existing partners, all with the goal of encouraging all these partnership organization to sell your products and services. Channel Partner Marketing refers to the components and processes your company puts in place to drive this resale channel.
The Benefits of Building a Sales Channel
Partner sales channels, sometimes referred to as “Indirect Sales Channels” have proven to be an effective way for many B2B sales organizations to drive revenue growth and market awareness. If your company is considering the development of a partner sales channel, some of the benefits that you can expect will include:
Cost-Effective
Reseller organizations typically rely on their own sales and marketing resources and often have all the necessary infrastructure in place to efficiently deliver results for your organization.
Time-to-Market
Leveraging indirect sales channels enables you to quickly penetrate new markets with a relatively low level of risk and cost.
Efficient Scale
In building a partner channel, you can quickly scale your sales organization without having to hire additional sales and marketing talent. This frees up your company resources to focus on product improvement and delivery.
Existing Customers
Many of the partner organizations you work with will already have an existing customer base they can tap into to market and sell your products and services. This can drive an immediate increase in your sales revenues.
Developing Your Channel Partner Marketing Strategy
While your specific channel partner marketing strategy will depend upon the type of partners you are looking to recruit, as well as the specific needs of your organization, the following is a list of components that tend to be part of any successful program.
Build Your Partner Profile
Building your channel partner marketing strategy starts with defining the characteristics of an organization you want to recruit to your program. This can include a review of the niche in which they currently operate, the products and services they currently offer (ideally, complementary to your offerings), company headcount, and revenues, to name a few. Once the company profile is defined, it will be easier for you to build a plan for finding and recruiting them.
Develop Your Recruitment Program
With your ideal partner profile established, you can build a strategy for recruitment. The goal of new partner recruitment is to communicate the benefits of your offerings through clear and concise messaging. Effective recruiting highlights the benefits of partnership to these organizations, including any unique advantages you can offer to their sales teams.
Create a Streamlined Onboarding Process
Your channel partner marketing and messaging should communicate to potential partners the ease in which they can join your program and be up-to-speed quickly. Be sure to minimize the amount of “red tape” thee partner organizations must deal with so that they can be up and running to sell your offerings as quickly as possible.
Provide Educational Resources
To help drive the greatest possible revenue from your channel partners, offer them all of the educational resources their sales reps will need to understand your offerings and to market them effectively. To accomplish this, many channel partner marketing programs now include an online learning or “eLearning” component. This is a cost-effective way to provide channel reps with the information they need, when and where they need it.
LMS Portals: eLearning for Your Channel Partner Marketing Strategy
LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant Learning Management System (LMS) to provide education and onboarding components as part of your channel partner marketing strategy. With LMS Portals, you can build and launch a private, customized eLearning environment for each of your channel partners to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the learning content and courses they need to effectively market and sell your company’s offerings.
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