If you’re involved with channel sales and marketing, I think you’ll agree that we are firmly in the partner-led economy. In fact, data provided in the latest State of Sales Report published by Salesforce demonstrates that 89% of IT vendors now consider their channel as their primary revenue stream, driving 70% or more of total revenue. Case in point, Palo Alto recently that 95% of their total revenue is generated through their channel. At risk of stating the obvious, your channel can literally make or break your business.
Given the gravity of channel-led revenue, it’s important to make sure you have a few basics covered to help ensure that you’re set up to maximize your channel success. In doing so, you’ll also give your partners their best opportunity for success while providing them with the tools they’re asking for. So let’s jump in!
- Set Your Base: The single most impactful thing you can do to maximize your channel is to make sure your partners are actually aligned with your products and program before you sign them up. We all know the 80/20 rule. Regardless of your specific ratio, if your partners are not deeply aligned, you’ll end up expending resources on partners that may never actually produce. Our advice – invest in data-driven approaches to profiling and identifying partners that best fit your products and program. If you have an existing partner program, start by using a tool like PartnerOptimizer to build profiles of your most productive partners. Then use this profile to find look-alikes and focus recruitment efforts on these prospects. If you are just getting started with your program, PartnerOptimizer can help you identify partners that best fit your criteria based on factors like certifications, complementary offerings, competing offerings and customer targets. In either scenario, if your partners’ DNA is a match for your program, you’ll reap the rewards.
- Help Your Partners Talk About You: One of the top asks partners make of their vendors is for better marketing support. The reality is that most resellers are small to mid-sized teams who are great technologists, not necessarily marketers, and who are busy servicing their clients. If you want to be a part of their conversations with end buyers, you have to make it easy for your partners to talk about you. Recent analysis from Canalys suggests that there are now 28 critical pre-sale marketing moments in the tech purchase cycle and that most to all of these 28 moments are happening through-partner. With this in mind, you must look for ways to consistently deliver your message through your partners in a way that is effortless for them to execute. The easier you make it for your partners, the more conversations you’ll be in. The more your partners talk about you, the more deals they’ll register.
- Build A Unified Market Presence To Scale Influence: The analysis from Canalys referenced above also states that end buyers now trust seven partners, on average, through their purchase cycle. For vendors, this exponentially increases the landscape you’ll need to cover in order to influence tech buyers. Through studying thousands of reseller websites, we’ve found that 48% of partner websites have no mention of the vendors within a given partner’s vendor portfolio. When content about vendors is present, 80% of the time that content is more than 6 months old. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to see content about vendor products that is up to three years old. Needless to say, technology content does NOT age like a fine wine. Old content simply makes both you and your partner look out of touch with end buyer needs, costing both of you deals. Multiply this problem out across the scale of your partner network and you’ll quickly see that you’ve got a narrative problem across your entire market. It is critical that you look for ways to consistently deliver your messaging across your partner network so that you maintain control of your narrative and so that end buyers see your products as a relevant offering. Not to mention, you’ll help your partners look like their at the tops of their games which is good for everyone.
In conclusion, if you start by recruiting only the right partners for your business, then help those partners effortlessly keep you top of mind while scaling your influence in the market, you’ll maximize your channel-led revenue.
Now is probably a great time to mention that we’ve built ChannelBridge to help you and your partners fully automate numbers 2 and 3!