ChannelVision Magazine July-August 2016

68 / 84

The key to a successful channel
sales program is to create a mutually
beneficial relationship between you
and your partners that increases profit
margins and adds value to the product
offerings of everyone involved.
These four insights can help
you forge an ironclad channel part-
ner program and build long-lasting
business relationships with your
channel partners.
No. 1: See it from
their POV
One essential practice in a strong
channel program is to consider
things from the other side: instead of
having a mentality of “go out and sell
my product,” you need to understand
your partner’s business.
Understand what your partner’s
value proposition to the end customer
is and then align your solutions with
your partner’s portfolio. Otherwise,
you’re trying to fit a square peg into
a round hole – as much as you may
strive to give your partners everything
they need to be successful, unless
you align with what they bring to the
marketplace, the strategy is not a
revenue-generating one.
This does not necessarily mean
you need to create an individual,
granular plan for each partner you
work with, but you can build pro-
grams geared toward supporting the
types of partners in a few key ways.
Messaging is an important part
of this. You must understand your
partner’s messaging and target your
own message in a way that accentuates
your partner’s portfolio, thereby al-
lowing the partner to strengthen its
value proposition to its
. 2: Add value
through support
Your channel partner is your cus-
tomer, and you need to serve your cus-
tomer in a way that allows the partner to
be successful with its own customers.
Ensure your products seam-
lessly integrate with those of your
partner’s solution set. The partner
should be able to see that distribut-
ing your product strengthens and
enhances its own value proposition to
its customers. However, while quality
products are vital to a channel part-
ner program, a partner also needs
to feel confident that a supplier can
support it in other ways as well. In
fact, a 2016 Vision Solutions partner-
ship survey found that more than half
(55 percent) of respondents said the
reason they had chosen their current
partners was because of support.
Therefore, you need to build a busi-
ness case around other ways in which
a partner would want to work with you.
While you must show that you can
make the partner more profitable, you
also must demonstrate that you can
give the partner the resources it needs
to be successful, such as technical
training, marketing development, tar-
geted campaigns for customers, sales
support and expertise in the field.
No. 3: Understand the
customer’s customer
When building out a structured
channel sales program, bear in
mind your partners’ go-to-market
strategies and how they serve their
customers. This will help you build
systems that allow your partners to
deliver your products effectively.
For example, when Vision Solu-
tions, a software-as-a-service (SaaS),
disaster recovery and migration ser-
vices provider,
(SI), we understand
the SI will have different needs from a
product delivery standpoint than a re-
gional solutions provider, although the
core elements of partner training and
enablement will be the same.
To illustrate, the SI might need to
deliver our services to customers in
highly regulated industries, such as
the financial industry. For us to get
software licenses to that kind of end
By Chris Clearly
Mutually Beneficial
How to make yourself indispensable to your channel partners
Reasons for Becoming Channel Partner
Product quality 69%
Quality support 55%
Training, sales/technical 9%
Source: Vision Solutions survey
IT Executives Who Consider Each Core
to Their Businesses
High availability disaster recovery 73%
Virtualization 62%
Data migration 45%
Date sharing 25%
Source: Vision Solutions survey
channel
MANAGEMENT
68 CHANNELVISION | July - August 2016