A channel partner is a commercial organization that collaborates with other businesses to market and sell their products and services. Channel partner can be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, and value-added re-sellers. Channel collaborators can do a world of good to your business but in order to attain maximum profits, you need to manage your partners in a structured way. Just like your direct sales team, your partners should also be managed in a synchronized way in order to attain maximum benefits from the partnership. Following are five major changes that you need to establish and manage a channel-based sales program:
• First of all, it is necessary to prepare an expected sales growth rate for each collaborator. It is essential to be clear with your partner about the minimum growth that you are expecting with this collaboration.
• However, do not expect this collaboration to bring in profits within the first month. It is best to change or increase the monthly expectation for sales and revenue generation each month after the first month.
• Apart from all this, it is necessary to size up the competency of your channel partner. Whether he is engaged in offering customer care service in India or in any other part of the world, his competency is and will be the deciding factor for the success of this business collaboration. So, you should assess the competency of your channel partner before sealing the deal.
• You should also implement strategies to attain maximum benefits out of channel partner collaborations. These strategies should be in sync with the expected sales growth rate from all your partners.
• Creating a common sales toolkit for channel partners can be a great step towards managing your business collaborations. This toolkit should comprise of messaging platforms, sales collateral, and should impart partners an access to webinars.
There are many other strategies that you can implement to manage channel-based sales programs. However, the ones that are mentioned above are just enough to obtain maximum benefits from this business partnership. Channel partners can help you achieve massive growth in the sales and revenue generated by your business. So, do take these steps to make the best use of this partnership. Many leading enterprises employ these strategies to attain maximum benefits through channel-based sales programs and you too can use them to achieve your business goals. Few of these changes can certainly help your business reach the pinnacle of success within a short span of time.
In this article, the author has talked about how you can make channel-based programs remunerative for your business.