Channel Sales

Partner Recruitment is a sales process in itself, and you need to take the partner on a buying journey to nurture and educate them towards becoming active and generating revenue (for you and them) in partnership.

For which you need:

• An excellent landing page that describes your “Partner Value Proposition“
• An easy to navigate Partner Portal that enables, trains, activates, and supports partners through their first deal.

Co-selling with partners can be a fine blend of support and collaboration to nurture customers along their own sales journey, led by the partner, but ensuring the customer sees the value of both the solution and the partnership. The tools of the trade include Try and Buy Trials and ways to encourage and support proof of concepts or Deal Registration and Promotions that grease the wheels of commerce and drive teamwork.

The Partner Account Manager (PAM) is both “Farmer” and “Hunter Gatherer” in terms of their sales skills.  PAMs need to be engaged at every level of the partners’ business to increase awareness and to educate and capture mindshare so that the partner teams put “You” first and their sales and marketing efforts reflect this. An essential PAM tool is visibility of the partner’s performance (revenue, certifications, and any other requirement to be “compliant” and achieve the right discount status). Proper performance dashboards against targets enables PAMS to have far more meaningful conversations and business reviews with their partners.

Channel sales require a plethora of tools to influence the behavior of both the partner and the customer, but most important is visibility. Having the tools and automation in place enables account managers to focus on helping partners drive new business. Eliminating the need to spend time on operational activities such as pulling data from multiple systems and trying to figure out where a partner is at in the sales cycle. Sales enablement in today’s channel requires a suite of different programs all targeted at driving the differing desired behaviors across the multitude of partner types.

Sales teams need to know where they are against targets, what new promotions are available and what more is needed to ensure everyone has a good quarter. Representing achievements visually is a great method of engaging partners as they can clearly see what they have achieved, earned and what is required to get to the next level. The saying of a picture paints a thousand words has never been truer than when it comes to channel sales.

Channel Mechanics is at the sharp end of managing and automating all your business interactions with a diverse mix of channel partners. Discover how our channel program automation platform can drive your channel sales programs to new heights