Channel Technology Partners - your sales and marketing multiplier

For technology companies hyper-focused on world class product development, driving efficient sales and marketing motions can be an uphill battle. Your brilliant innovations deserve to reach their full market potential, but doing everything in-house puts immense strain on your internal teams. This is where cultivating over time a strong channel partner and distributor relationships can be a game-changer.

The Challenge of In-House Sales and Marketing:

As a technology company, your strengths likely lie in engineering, R&D, and delivering exceptional customer experiences through your core offerings. However, sales and marketing are entirely different disciplines requiring specialised skills and huge time investments. Building these capabilities internally can be costly, inefficient, and divert precious resources away from your core competencies.  

Relying solely on inbound leads and in-house salespeople also artificially limits your reach. You may be missing out on entire markets, verticals, or geographical regions where you could be thriving with the right relationships in place. Effective channel partners can open doors to coveted new customer segments.

The Power of the Channel:

Partnering with quality resellers, distributors, consultants and other go-to-market experts allows you to leverage their hard-earned sales and marketing skills while focusing on what you do best - innovating amazing products. Properly enabled, your channel partners become force multipliers armed with crystal clear messaging and the right information for every stage of the sales cycle to bring deals home for you.

However, building and nurturing a high-performing channel ecosystem requires careful strategy and program design. Based on our experience, here are 7 keys concepts to multiplying your sales and marketing impact:

1. Define Your Ideal Profile 

Not all Channel Partners are built the same. Spend time upfront defining the exact type of channel partners you want - their skills, expertise, market penetration, verticals, etc. This criteria will guide efficient recruitment.

2. Deliver Compelling Incentives

Channel partners have multiple vendor relationships. Make yours stand out with attractive margins, co-marketing funds, comprehensive training, and quality resources.

3. Seamless Onboarding and Enablement

Provide a world-class onboarding experience complete with training, documentation, and equipping partners to pitch your solutions effectively from day one. Make sure to document and scale this approach as you bring more partners onboard for consistency and efficiency.

4. Drive Consistent Collaboration 

Maintain consistent communication through regular updates, check-ins, and a feedback loop to surface improvement opportunities for your channel program. This also keeps you and your offering front of mind.

5. Prioritise Marketing Support

Channel marketing is pivotal. Allocate co-marketing funds, as proportionate to your growth expectations, and resources to empower campaigns, events, and localised lead generation by partners.

6. Implement Governance and Guidelines

Prevent conflicts by mapping out clear territories, lead management processes, and rules of engagement across your channel ecosystem. This is often a sticking point that can lead to  

7. Continuously Measure and Optimise

Regularly analyse partner performance data to identify standout performance areas for additional focus and optimisations to your program.

The Multiplier Advantage

Forming strategic channel partnerships is an ongoing journey requiring deliberate program design, partner enablement, and continuous refinement. For companies willing to put the hard work in harnessing the rewards are absolutely there.

At its core, building a robust channel program both accelerates and amplifies your sales and marketing reach exponentially through experts immersed in their local markets. With the right strategy, technology companies can concentrate on visionary R&D while channel partners propel revenue growth. How good does that sound!