Building strong internal infrastructure, establishing sound policies, recruiting right partners, empowering partners with effective trainings, sale and marketing tools, and setting up a scorecard to link rewards with partner's performance is not the full recipe for success. Partners are independent people, businesses. They have different business objectives than yours. They are accountable to their stakeholders and their bottom-line. Therefore it is critical to take the steward’s role and become trusted business advisors in building their sales. Business that takes this step and engage with partners in building their business always get fascinating results i.e. increased revenue, deeper market penetration and strong customer loyalty. There are many ways to increase your partners’ productivity, few are listed below:
- Joint Business Planning
Traditionally, manufacturer is responsible for building the brand awareness that partners capitalize on to move products. With the death of interruption advertising and the changing customers’ preferences, this approach alone is not productive enough. A joint marketing approach where a partner and the manufacturer collectively plan on tactics to reach a target market is the best way forward.In joint marketing, manufacturer’s value propositions move from supplier to the trusted advisor committed towards the success of its partner. This automatically demands the same level of commitment from the partners hence creating a real strategic alliance a win-win situation.
Growing trend in joint business planning is to create custom marketing campaign to generate new leads within the partner’s target market. This is the best use of manufacturer’s MDF’s (Marketing Development Funds) and the best example of think big act local. This approach has many advantages including:
- More qualified leads that results in quick close
- Minimized channel conflict
- Strong partners’ commitment
- Enhanced partner productivity
- Partnersourcing Programs
Who came up with the idea for Big Mac? If your answer is McDonald, than I am afraid you’re off the mark. It was McDonald franchisee– the front line people working directly with the end customers – who came up with this winning product idea. As a manufacturer build strong partner base, it increasingly become distant from the dynamic of marketplace and loses touch with the needs of their customers. Establish a good channel feedback program and rewarding partners for their winning suggestion is the sure shot way to increase their productivity.There are many ways to collect channel partner feedback including surveys, face-to-face interviews, and structured ‘partner leadership councils’. Each of these methods has their own strengths. For example, survey are easy to administer, but do not provide enough insight into shifting perception in customer base, sources of big new revenue etc. face-to-face structured interview allow you to collect strategic intelligence but are difficult to get the buy-in for new programs to capture the new identified marketing opportunity. The ‘partner leadership councils’ brings the best of the both world. It is the forum that provides the voice to your partners to share new market opportunities, advice on new product development, and adjust go-to-market strategies.
It doesn’t matter how you collect this information. The real trick is to act on it and award partners for proactively supporting you.
Summary
Indirect (Partner) channels are one of the best ways to increase revenue growth and reach diverse markets. They are also one of the most complex parts of the integrated multi-channel go-to-market system. Once implemented, however, they guarantee the success of business because partners can deliver sales and support at relatively low costs and reach more customers.
Though, partners come in many shape and sizes with different labels, fortunately, the process of building this channel and managing is straightforward and simple. It is:
- Build the organizational structure to execute the partner strategy. This including hiring right staff and empowering them to execute the strategy. Documenting clear policies and procedures and finally developing an attractive value propositions for partners
- Recruiting right partners and enabling them with right tools to effectively achieve their targets. Since partners can play different roles in a sales cycle it is critical to clearly define and communicate expectations and put in place a holistic scorecard to monitor partner and change their behavior by incentivizing the right activities.
- Improve the sales productivity by becoming real strategic partners in building joint business plans and engaging partners in product development – a key tool in increasing the productivity.
The success of indirect channel depends on the level of commitment that the manufacturer makes towards its partners and vice versa. The indirect channel will not produce results if the partners are left without proper training, sales and market and service support.