BROADCASTS.com

It\u2019s hard to get a true picture of how your channel partners feels about you as a vendor just by sending out a survey. As we discussed in a previous post, most requests for feedback yield responses from only the top-performing channel partners. But the ones you really need to know most about are those who are selling little or nothing at all of what you have to offer. The upside of converting just a few of these into high performance partners will be huge. The path to breakthrough lies in understanding what prevents channel partners from committing to a relationship with a vendor, starting with those who have dropped your solutions completely.\nGetting to these channel partners takes time-intensive, though high ROI work. On behalf of many large companies, we have reached out personally thousands of channel partners world wide to ask the most important question: Why did you stop reselling for us? The results of our research showed that the top reasons for dropping a vendor were, in order of importance, poor technical support, lack of lead flow, and inadequate sales assistance. Fixing these problems will go a long way towards building bridges with disaffected channel partners, but paying attention to the following five areas will secure your position as a highly relevant vendor with a loyal and engaged channel.\n\n\n \tSpecial Pricing\xa0- One of the biggest hurdles for channel partners worldwide is special pricing. The larger the deal, the more resellers need to be able to offer special pricing because the buyer wants to know and show to management that the price was unbeatable. We have often seen channel partners lose deals to competitors because of overly complex special pricing processes. Delay and uncertainty about pricing will drive the end customer \u2013 who after too long a sales process is usually feeling that their requests are not being heard \u2013 to dump the original vendor and go with someone else. It is critical to make sure you have put in place a complete and transparent process for special pricing, beyond the list price. This is less the case with SMB transactions, but is critical for complex and large deployments.\n \tMarketing Funds & Programs\xa0\u2013 Once you have convinced the partner base that you are there for them through world-class technical support, lead distribution, sales assistance and special pricing, the next essential is helping the channel partners to drive leads on their own - although don\u2019t expect them to become digital marketers overnight!\n\nWe have repeatedly seen that the vendors who are most successful in encouraging channel partners to market on their own are those who take a pragmatic, multi-quarter approach to building out their demand generation programs across horizontal products that sell in the highest volumes across all market segments, and then (only then) add specific, targeted vertical campaigns. This approach also calls for a state-of-the-art partner relationship management platform, which not only include a set of tools to train the partner on various aspects of the solutions, but also a set of do-it-yourself marketing campaigns running on a fully integrated marketing automation platform.\n\n\n \tEase of Doing Business\xa0- We hear this again and again from channel partners. Most partners feel there are too many hoops and obstacles to go through to be able to sell a vendor\u2019s products. Challenges ranging from technical certification, demo purchase requirements, license key issues, availability of technical and sales support and accessibility of sales tools all make it far from easy for a partner to form a relationship with and stay on board with vendors.\n\nWhile vendors may want to try to remove all these hurdles at once, the more realistic way forward for a successful channel programs is to take a pragmatic approach. Start by determining what the partner is actually going to sell. If it is a transactional product, there is no place for complexity. Drop as many of the hurdles as possible,