After successfully recruiting preferred channel partners, the next step is to educate and develop their staff—sales, marketing and technical—to sell, market, and support the manufacturer’s products more effectively. For example, if partners are selling a product that is mature and advanced in its lifecycle or one that has become a commodity, then a manufacturer must, at the very, least impart a basic product knowledge and feature differentiators. If, however, the product is earlier in its lifecycle or you require partners to assist you in developing the market, then you should offer them much more. Either way, you have to initiate marketing support, training, and sales and technical support programs for your partners to be successful. Let’s see what these programs entail.
- Marketing Support
The only reason an intermediary will join your partner program is to make money! If they are not making money, they will quit. Everything and anything that you could do to help them sell will help you retainer great partners and will eventually improve your top line.At the very minimum, marketing support for a partner channel involves all of the traditional techniques for generating demand i.e., effective branding, aggressive advertising, unique promotions, etc. In addition, partners should be provided with their own tools to generate demand on their own level. This may include:
- Marketing Kit
Giving partners a standard marketing kit filled with well-tested messages, facts, and sale pitches will improve their selling productivity. A typical marketing kit may contain product factsheets, presentations, a customized website, email campaign material, sales letters, etc.
- Demonstrators
As a basic rule, customers want to see, touch, feel, and understand a product before buying. Partners that have a product to demonstrate will be more effective in selling it. Giving demonstrator / sample products for free could be a good tool to increase their selling productivity.
- Advertising Allowances (Co-op, MDF, SPIF)
Supporting partners in their advertising is an effective way to ensure that they make more sales. The allowance could be in hard cash or could be the part of compensation commission.
- Co-branding
Allowing partners to use your logo and other trademarks and mentioning these partners in your own advertisements will add credibility and prestige to your marketing message and will draw more customers.
- Generate demand and be seen to do it
Creating sales promotions, and running through partners will help them move more products.
- Marketing Kit
- Product and Sales Training
Would you hire a salesperson and throw her out in the marketplace without first educating her on your products and, more importantly, on how to sell them? Of course not! The same logic applies to partners. Since most partners are small organizations with a less experienced sales force, they should be provided with detailed product training so they can demonstrate the product and effectively close a sale.This training could be provided in a face-to-face setting or through online tools like video conferencing, web chat, etc. This kind of training is a good investment for two reasons: 1) it will help increase the partner sales volume, and 2) enhance the partner relationship, who view training as a manufacturer's commitment towards building their business.
This training should include:
- Product feature training
- Seminar focused on customer need analysis
- Scenarios in which partners can refine and test their pitches to sell the product to different customers
- Sales and Technical Support
It is a costly mistake to assume that a partner will take a shipment of a product and move it into the hands of its customers without any direct selling assistance. Many partners need support in closing the deal and in solving customers' technical problems. Offering a sales assistance program along with back-end technical support not only increases the productivity of partners, it also improves the relationship and makes you the partner of choice!Technology advances in collaboration tools like web conferencing and VoIP, and in learning management tools, provide easy and economic ways to offer back-end support. Another way to offer the same level of technical support at low-cost is outsourced call centers. No matter what tools you use, providing sales assistance and technical support will boost your channel partners.
Channel partners are just an extension of your sales force. The productivity of your partner channels is really in your hands. The closer the relationship you build and the more comprehensive marketing tools and assistance you provide, the better the results you will achieve.
The game doesn't end here, after providing all the right tools to sell, you need to keep track of the progress of your partner. That's where a scorecard become handy. Next section describe the process to build a scorecard for partners' performance management.