It's quite rare these days to sell direct to customers. Instead, many brands engage the services of channel partners, who sell your products (as well as those of your competitors'). Here's how you can tell which channel partners might need a little extra boost, and how you can achieve that!
In modern business, it's rare to find brands that sell directly to customers. This is because direct sales teams require substantial expenditure in talent, training and technology.
The alternative is to engage channel partners, which need much lower levels of investment. However, the downside of using channel partners is that your competitors are engaging their services too - often, one channel partner will be selling multiple products, and there's no guarantee they're going to focus on your brand over the rest.
That's why it's important that you can tell which channel partners are meeting your business goals, and which ones might need a little extra boost.
How to tell which channel partnerships are working
Your channel partners will give you regular sales figures and other KPI measurements which you can review to assess the following:
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Are there any partners that don't contribute significantly to revenue?
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Is the cost of using the partner beginning to outweigh the returns?
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Are there any partners where it's more difficult to launch new products and/or where new products aren't selling very well?
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Is customer feedback worse from certain channel partners than others?
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Are there any channel partners that you have difficulty communicating with? Are there any that don't return your calls, or you find it hard to supply with new product information or pricing strategies?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you may have an under-performing channel partner on your hands.
How can you help these channel partners improve?
When brands are reliant on channel partners to make sales, even one or two under-performing businesses could have a significant impact on your bottom line. So it's important that you help these channel partners succeed. Do this by:
1) Providing resources
The priority for channel partners is keeping their customers happy. They want to ensure they're giving prospects the most accurate information possible so that whatever product they sell is directly helping their customers. If you aren't giving them easy-to-use resources, your channel partners are never going to promote your products above your competitors'.
It's a good idea to create an online platform that provides channel partners with brochures, spec sheets, value statements and pricing information so that they can upskill themselves on individual products. Try sending out fortnightly or monthly emails with any product updates or new offer information. You could also host events (either online or in-person) that allow channel partners to ask any questions they might have about your product.
The key here is open communication. You need to be available at all times to help your channel partners inform themselves about your brand.
When you want to improve a channel partner's sales, you can create a tailored rewards program that starts small, and gets bigger as you start to see higher sales.
2) Create co-branded literature
Simply throwing all the brochures you have at your channel partners isn't enough, however. Discuss creating co-branded literature that features both your channel partners and your own brand name. This can be directly targeted to the markets your channel partner operates in, and helps them to pick out the most useful and relevant information for their customers.
3) Provide incentives
This is something you should be doing for your best resellers and the ones that need an extra boost. Power 2 Motivate UK's Reseller and Channel Partner Incentive Programmes allow you to tailor an incentives strategy to the needs of your individual channel partner relationship.
For those that are already out-performing, you can reinforce this behaviour by rewarding them for hitting KPIs, and providing extra incentives for going above and beyond.
When you want to improve a channel partner's sales, you can create a tailored rewards program that starts small, and gets bigger as you start to see higher sales.
For more information on any of our rewards programmes, contact a member of the Power 2 Motivate UK team today!