Convey's Channel Partner MicroCast

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Communicating the Right Message

Convey Micro-Cast Series

This is Carolyn Bradfield and you’re listening to Convey’s Micro-Cast audio series.  

The way we communicate has changed forever.  In our personal lives, we send text messages, use Facebook messenger, and use Instagram.  Our communication has gotten shorter, more direct, and to the point.  In business, however, we fail to recognize that short, sweet and to the point is the way people like to receive our messages.  Communicating the right message in the right way in the channel is no different.

Here are three critical mistakes we see companies make when they communicate with their sales partners:

1.         Oversharing.  We have thousands of content posts across hundreds of vendors on our master agent portals.  When we look inside a vendor content catalog and see dozens of content posts, we worry that the vendor is now oversharing.  Most of the time, more is not more and having less material gets people to focus on what is important.

2.         Focusing only on the product.  Knowing the features of the product is important, but it’s not the most critical thing that partners look for.  They need to be informed about the right customer, the best markets, and why they should trust you as a vendor.

3.         Failing to recognize what partners really care about.  Partners care about serving the customer but they also care about the bottom line.  Is this product easy or hard to sell?  What resources will it take to develop a customer base?  And how do they make money with you?

So how does a channel program deliver the right message to engage a sales partner.  Here are 3 simple strategies to help you with messaging.

# 1 Add a simple battle card to serve as an overview.

We all like to read the summary before we read the book, the review before we see the movie and the battlecard before we dive into a vendor’s services. For those of you less familiar with them, battlecards are a 1-page overview of your partner program, services, and financial incentives.  They are the most viewed content, outside of spiffs and promotions, on Convey master agent portals and an essential content piece for all partner programs.

#2 Focus on the ideal customer profile

You cannot win every deal that a partner gives you, but you can win the ones that are the best fit.  Let the partner know who the ideal customer is by defining the size of the company, vertical markets they exist in, their characteristics, and why they would buy.  Knowing who to refer to you is more important than the features of your product and services. 

#3 Let the partner know how to do business with you and quantify what it’s worth

So, the partner has found the right customer.  What’s next?  Do you want them to get a quote from you?  Register the deal online?  Set up a meeting?  Or what?  Partners need to know the rules of engagement, so they know exactly what to do with the prospect.  And certainly, a partner needs to know what’s in it for them.  If they sell the deal, what’s the commission value?  Is there a promotion to incent the customer to buy or a spiff to reward them for the sale?  Make sure they understand the numbers.

The right time message is very important when it comes to partner communication and that message needs to be short, clear and direct.  It has to focus first on the value of doing business with you, the type of partner and customer you want, where to find them and what to do when they are found, and how partners make money.  
Convey’s channel program offers many opportunities to deliver the right message i

Some of you listening to this MicroCast don’t know who Convey Channel is.  Others of you are wondering how we fit into your channel marketing strategy, and yet others are thinking about expanding your relationship with us.  For those of you that don’t know us, Convey Channel is designed to be part of your digital marketing strategy.  We run an industry content distribution and marketing network in the channel linking over 40 master agents with their vendors and distributing information to their 23,000 sales partners that subscribe to portals as members.

Here are 5 quick reasons to get to know the Convey Channel program, how we help bring efficiency to your communication strategy and how we help you get results.

First, Convey helps you eat a balanced marketing diet.

Being successful at channel marketing is like eating a balanced diet.  Some of us have been on these crazy diet plans where we eat an abundance of one food to the exclusion of others.  For me, it’s the cabbage soup diet.   But once you are into your diet, you start to crave the foods that aren’t part of the plan.  Channel marketing is no different.  If you don’t vary the menu, partners will get tired of your meal and start looking elsewhere for something more satisfying.   Consider the Convey Channel program to be part of that balanced diet because it puts your information online, keeps it available 24/7 and if you do a good job adding content, provides partners with a satisfying meal every time they look at you.

Convey promote efficiency and convenience for you and the partner

The channel has experienced explosive growth in the last 5 years.  Before the cloud, cybersecurity and the move to wireless, partners only had to keep up with a few network vendors, not hundreds of them.  And the number of partners selling services has expanded with the entry of VARs, MSPs and other non-traditional referral partners.    

You don’t have the time to get information in everyone’s hands if you don’t use automation and partners don’t have time to search the web for all things hosted voice and the other services they sell. Convey’s portals puts your information in a single place, make it convenient for partners to find it, help the master agent out because he doesn’t have to distribute it and makes it more efficient for channel marketing to manage it. 

Third reason: We empower you to define your partner program

Let’s face it.  Most of you don’t really want or need every partner out there to try and sell your services. You could try that strategy you end up with endless quotes, frustrated partners and very few deals.  You have to define who you want to do business with, both on the partner and customer side.  Catalog owners inside a Convey master agent portal use pages and content posts to define their program, focus partners on the type of accounts that are in the vendor’s sweet spot, and what partnership benefits are part of their channel program.

4th, Convey creates opportunities to engage

Just having content to read with no call to action makes it very difficult for a vendor to see if the strategy of having a digital presence is really working.  Partners that look at a vendor catalog on any of our master agent or vendor portals need a call to action, and Convey Channel is designed to help partners engage with you by requesting quotes, registering for webinars, requesting access to your partner portal, or filling out contact forms. 

And last, but not least, Convey keeps your company top of mindshare

Channel programs rely too heavily on face to face encounters with partners, but the fact is that when the event is over and the partner is on the way home, most of the information they learned is already on the way out the window.  The Convey Channel program

Transcript

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace.

The concept of providing partners with sales leads is not a new one, but automating the way you collect them, distribute them to partners and a process to ensure those leads are not wasted requires new thinking and automation.  In this microcast we are going to share some ideas about how to generate leads for very little money, the business rules you should consider before you decide to give those leads out, and the automation to deliver, manage and track the way leads move through the funnel using Convey’s partner portal technology.

Finding sales leads doesn’t have to be time-consuming and expensive.  

When it comes to finding leads, you have technology-driven options that improve the quantity and quality of leads that you can provide to partners.  Your channel organization can engage in content marketing, social media outreach or drip marketing campaigns to drive inbound demand.  But for this microcast, I want to focus on a strategy called data scraping to produce larger lead lists.  Although you can try data scraping yourself, it’s much easier and cheaper to use freelancers who have technology that scour the web to generate leads.  Freelancers use your criteria to create a custom lead list at a fraction of the cost and of much higher quality than any lead lists you might purchase.

So how do you gain access to these valuable resources?  Freelancers exist all over the world and the hourly rate for someone in India or in the Philippines as an example that can generate a lead list is embarrassingly low for the high-quality output they produce.  The best way to engage a high-quality freelancer is to use a service like UpWork or FIVRR, spelled F-I-V-R-R where freelancers are profiled on their portal.  You can put in your project requirements, find freelancers who have done projects like this before, and get reviews on their work from other customers.  You pay the platform provider and they pay the worker.  

Freelancers can create a customized lead list using a process called data scraping.  In simple terms, they use software to access multiple websites to find information on companies or individuals including names, titles, contact information, email addresses, company size, or locations.  That information is delivered to you in a spreadsheet so you can import it into the technology you will use to manage and distribute those leads.  You can even take this further and pay a freelancer to do some investigation or calling to qualify that lead.

To give you an idea of how effective freelancers and data scraping is as a strategy, Convey employed a freelancer in the Philippines at $3.50 an hour and for less than $600 they delivered a 6,000 person lead list of individuals inside companies in the Southeast that were candidates to use technology in their buildings to reduce energy cost.

Set business rules so partners understand your expectations and those leads are not wasted.

The worst thing you can do is give leads to someone without any expectation of getting something in return. My suggestion is to have partners opt in to receive leads from you versus just sending them out.  Leads are valuable and they should be reserved for partners that have achieved a certain status in your channel, that are willing to act on the leads, and that will allow you to follow up on their progress. Insight from the partner gives you what you need to assess the lead quality, how they marketed to the prosp

Transcript

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace. 

Most of the providers that Convey works with would love to have partners use marketing to promote their services, but the reality is that partners rarely do what we think that they should.  So why is it that partners don’t use the same marketing strategies that have proven so effective in the technology marketplace?

First, partners just don’t have the time to devote to marketing.  Partners are generally attached to very small agencies, so they are having to do it all.  They have to secure more customers, educate them about services, manage the order and installation process, and respond to issues when the technology doesn’t work the way they expect.  Marketing is generally last on the list.

Second, being creative doesn’t come easy for partners.

In a former life I was an English teacher and taught writing, among other things.  I consider myself pretty good at it, but the vast majority of people I work with struggle to put the right words together.  So, imagine the difficulty in creating a marketing email, a social media post or a blog if you can’t think of what to say.  

Third, partners don’t know how to generate a lead list to market to.
If you are going to deliver an email campaign, target people to invite to an event or even try and influence people on social media, you have to have a way to generate a list.  Partners don’t really have the understanding how to create lists of people that they can work with and then what to do even if they had a list. 

Convey’s philosophy has always been that if you do the work for partners, provide them marketing tools, and then show them how to get a good list they will be much more likely to add marketing to their revenue strategy.   We’ve built marketing tools inside the Convey portal designed to motivate partners to use them. 

We’ve added an easy way for partners to share content. 
You’ve uploaded a case study, a white paper or product information that’s meant to be shared with customers.  Partners have two easy sharing options every time they access content.  An obvious thing they can do is to download a file if you havean uploaded one for viewing but an even easier process is our One Touch Email Share.

Here is how it works.  Partners see that case study or product literature and then click the email share button.  No matter what email client they use, it opens automatically with a link to the content post already in the email.  The partner just adds a personal message, then sends the email to their customer or prospect.  When the prospect clicks the link, they don’t come back inside your portal, but they do come back to a landing page to view, download or reshare the content.  Easy email marketing!  And the best news is that our reporting tool shows you which pieces of content were shared, and which partners did that.

For partners that really want to commit to an email strategy, we have a unique service inside of every portal called Conduct.

For those of you who are now thinking that email marketing is dead, think again!  Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media, according to a study done by McKinsey & Company. The same study also shows that the buying process happens 3 times faster with email than in social media. Moreover, it is also said that most individuals prefer to receive business information via email

Transcript

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace.

Nowhere is the old phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” more true than in the channel.  So many channel programs rely too heavily on face to face encounters at trade shows, regional events or sponsorships, but forget the fact that when the event is over and the partner is on the way home, most of the information they learned is already on its way out the window.  Having a digital strategy to reinforce the message and stay in front of partners even when you are not with them is essential to staying top of mindshare. 

Mindshare is simply the amount of attention you get from your partner network. When a sales opportunity presents itself, are partners thinking of your company first?  Keep in mind that your products aren’t the only ones they’re marketing and selling in our crowded telco and cloud space.  Your channel program can only have so much to say about the quality, price, and delivery of the products, but you can separate yourself from the competition by winning the mindshare battle with your partners.

Here are some general best practices that you should follow when you want partners to notice you and be the first thing they think about when they are in front of a customer.

First, be clear about what makes you unique in the marketplace.  Is it your market niche? Exceptional service? Highly targeted products and services? Make this value proposition simple and easy to remember. Here is an example in a statement that’s clear, “We provide HIPAA compliant cloud hosting to healthcare.”  

Second, keep the messages coming.
A one-time advertising blitz can get your message out quickly to a large number of partners, but staying top of mindshare requires consistent delivery of messaging over time. Keep it coming.

Third, make sure partners know it’s you.
Everything from your customer literature to your e-newsletters should have consistent messaging and similar look and feel. One brand, one message.

Fourth, use a balanced approach.
Stay in front of your audience using multiple channels over time. Awareness is based on repetition.

And last, provide information that is useful.
Frequency doesn’t have to mean being annoying. Partners should perceive you as a provider of useful information rather than an intrusive pest. Communicate frequently but give your partners genuine value each time.

Having a digital strategy that leverages automation allows a channel program to be clear about who they are, have consistent branding, keep the messages coming, and make sure the information is useful.  Let’s see how you can accomplish all of those goals using Convey’s technology.

Start by defining the type of partner you want, the type of customer you want them to pursue and use technology to get your point across.

At Convey, we see that many channel programs trying to be all things to all partners.  We have over 20,000 sales partners that use our portals to get information on providers but in reality, only a fraction of those partners will affiliate with you.  If a program tries to go “wide” they will end up quoting lots of deals, rejecting many of them because they just aren’t viable, and driving the partner away because they become frustrated.

There are digital strategies inside of our Convey programs for providers to define the type of partner they really want to work with and the ideal customer profile they want them to pursue.  In our Convey Channel pro

Transcript

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace.

Convey is a big believer that every channel program should be automated, have a digital strategy and the right technology tools for their partners.  And we believe strongly that having a PRM or partner relationship management system is a must-have for all channel programs.  Unlike a CRM that is designed primarily for direct sales, a PRM brings a channel program the following benefits.

PRMs streamline partner onboarding. If you bring on new partners constantly, using a manual process to onboard them wastes lot of internal resources versus a PRM solution that is more efficient.
 
PRMs manage education and training.  A PRM provides programs the ability to execute a well-defined learning plan to make sure partners know which customers to pursue, the markets they exist in, the right sales process and good basic product knowledge.  PRMs keep this training online and constantly available.
 
PRMs offer communication & marketing support.  They have tools to manage documents, communications, and other marketing assets in one online location. This ensures that partners can find the right information at the right time, allowing them to sell more effectively.
 
PRMs help you get the ROI for marketing or sales expenses.  Incentives are an essential element to drive partner performance. PRMs enable you to gauge what motivates them so you can reallocate funds based on what’s working or not.
 
PRMs automate how you get the word out about new products. Having a well-designed PRM solution lets partners know what’s new and provides the ability to give real-time feedback on products. This ensures that launches can go off without a hitch.

And last but not least, PRMs increase partner satisfaction.  Partners do not have unlimited resources and time, so when you offer a more efficient and beneficial way to do business with you, partners will naturally look to you to provide them with solutions for their customer base vs. your competition.
 
In today’s microcast we are going to focus on the tools inside the Convey PRM system that automate your program, increase your team’s efficiency and make it easy for partners to do business with you. 

Let’s start with how Convey streamlines partner onboarding.  
 If you participate in Convey’s Channel Program, you may be maintaining a catalog that is viewed on our master agent portals.  But those master agents are not going to give you their partner list.  Getting partners to become members of your portal allows you to develop personal relationships with and engage directly with them.  

Convey’s PRM automates how partners become members in the first place by turning on an automated application process. Partners fill out the application, adding information that you find valuable.  The PRM can approve partners immediately providing login credentials or have an approval process for you to screen the application and approve or deny it.

If you add the partner to the member database directly, Convey delivers a welcome email automatically that you can customize message including a password set link.

Convey’s portals are designed to provide education and training.

It’s our philosophy that training and education can take many forms, all of which are supported by our portal technology.  Portals are divided into content catalogs, so you can choose to conso

Transcript

Automating and Upgrading Your Channel Program

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace. 

Because Convey lives in the world of automation and digital experiences, we are going to overview several key areas that providers and master agents can execute in an efficient and automated way to distinguish their channel programs in order to attract more partners and keep them engaged.    In subsequent microcast sessions, we’ll take each individual segment and devote our podcast to the steps you can take to turn one of these concepts into reality using technology as the backbone to execute the strategy.

Technology companies should use technology to make it convenient for partners to get product information, to learn how to sell services, to see real life examples of success, and to understand how they fit into your strategy.  If partners find it hard to get information or think it’s difficult to sell your solutions, they will switch to selling other solutions that are easier. 

Digital strategy #1 is to automate how you find, deliver and manage sales leads for partners.

Ask any master agent what partners would like most and most of them will answer, “a good old-fashioned sales lead”.  But providers struggle with the time and expense of finding the lead, the best way to distribute those leads to partners, and how to make sure that the leads they deliver are not wasted.   

When it comes to finding the lead, you have many options rooted in technology.  Your organization can engage in content marketing, social media outreach, or an activity called data scraping.  Freelancers have technology that scours the web to generate leads based on your criteria that will generate a custom lead list that is at a fraction of the cost and much higher quality than most lead lists you might purchase.

When it comes to distributing and managing those leads, Convey has options inside its partner relationship management system to add prospects to a sales partner’s dashboard, set the rules around how they accept the lead and a feedback loop to ensure they are following up.

Digital strategy number 2 is to use technology to stay top of mindshare by continually engaging partners.

Nowhere is the old phrase, “out of sight, out of mind” more true than in the channel.  So many channel programs rely too heavily on face to face encounters at trade shows, regional events or sponsorships, but forget the fact that when the event is over and the partner is on the way home, most of the information they learned is already on its way out the window.  Having a digital strategy to reinforce the message and stay in front of partners even when you are not with them is essential to staying top of mindshare.

You might still print those 4-color marketing slicks, but partners would rather get your information online.  If you don’t have a LinkedIn page or up-to-date profiles for your people, you look unprofessional and disorganized.  And if you’re using your corporate website to distribute information to both partners and customers, then partners are missing valuable things they need to do business.

Digital strategy number 3 is provide tools for your partners that automate how they engage and market to their prospects and customers.

One of the biggest challenges in providing tools to your partners is that partners have all levels of marketing expertise. Some partners may be better at marketing than their vendors, but most have limited capabilities, and some&

Full Transcript

Convey Micro-Cast Series

This is Carolyn Bradfield and you’re listening to the Convey Micro-Cast audio series.  

This week is our Halloween Micro-Cast series and we gave Freddy Krueger a shout out in our first episode, the Nightmare on Channel Street.  We identified nightmares in the channel that keep you up at night, can ruin your channel program and destroy your revenue.  Today we’re going to focus on the “Invasion of the Sales Partner Snatchers.

You used to go to Channel Partners in Vegas and there were thousands of partners wandering through the exhibit hall or attended regional meetings.  Then, all of a sudden, the invasion of the partner snatchers descended on the channel and one by one those partners started disappearing snatched away and gone forever.

If pods from outer space didn’t spirit partners away, then where did they go?  The answer is complicated.  People became agents years ago because they may have been in a company’s telecom department, then decided to branch out and start their own business.  Many of these partners are now aging out, retiring, or just not active and they are being replaced by new partner models that may not be so obvious to you.  So, what are vendors and master agents to do so they don’t experience the nightmare of the disappearing partner on Channel Street?  Here are some thoughts:

Diversify your partner base.

If the only type of sales partner you have focused on is the telecommunications agent, you are missing a variety of other partner types that have the right customer base not only for network services, but for cloud and business as a service.  And you may be putting your channel program at risk as your traditional partner base shrinks. Think about including managed services providers, value added resellers and IT service providers.   After you do that, look around and consider less traditional partners that are calling on accounts with non-technology-based services.

Here is an example. The other day I ate lunch with an insurance agent who is building a practice around commercial insurance for assisted living facilities.  That person would make a great referral partner because those facilities need to upgrade their phone system, move applications to the cloud, use technology to make their buildings smarter, and network their locations together.  He’s non-traditional but he’s calling on the right customers in a high-value target market. 

Once you diversify it’s important to understand the different type of partner models and how they function.

Let’s take the managed services provider as an example whose business model is different than a telecommunications agent.  An MSP owns the customer relationship because they not only manage their IT and network, they also invoice the customer for services rendered.  MSPs will often step aside and let the vendor take the lead when it comes to selling services that they don’t have native expertise in, making them an ideal partner who wants a trusted relationship with a master agent or vendor and is willing to make the referral.

It’s also important to learn where the new partner types hang out and plan to go where those partners congregate.

If you expect these different partner types such as an MSP or VAR to haunt the hallways of Channel Partners in Vegas or other telecommunications-oriented events, think again.  They will likely be elsewhere.  Expand your presence at organizations like ASCII or shows like IT Expo to find other technology-oriented partners.

And think about where other referral partners might be who are not technology sellers.  If you sell to healthcare, there are numerous industry tradeshows where you might form relationships with vendors who are selling to the multi-location assisted living facility or

Full Transcript
Convey Micro-Cast Series

This is Carolyn Bradfield and you’re listening to the Convey Micro-Cast audio series.  

This week is our Halloween Micro-Cast series and we gave Freddy Krueger a shout out in our first episode, the Nightmare on Channel Street.  We identified nightmares in the channel that keep you up at night, can ruin your channel program and destroy your revenue.  Today we’re going to focus on vendors that checked into the Bates Motel, handed over their MDF funds, and thought they were getting the key to channel revenue, only to never come out alive.

Your Vegas hotel bill, those huge green fees at the golf tournament, or sponsorships for that expensive cocktail party have been washed down the drain with very few partners that you hoped would engage actually selling your services.  You try to wake up from the nightmare where you are being chased by your management team, screaming that you don’t know what the ROI is, which partners were converted and what revenue is going to result from your efforts. 

You are caught up at the Bates Motel in the Nightmare on Channel Street, but there are ways to make sure that your marketing development funds give you a provable ROI, don’t break your budget and produce partner relationships and customer referrals.  Here are some thoughts. 

Don’t overspend on live events by changing your event strategy.

Vendors tend to overspend on events by sponsoring a cocktail party, complete with a killer band, great drinks and in a cool venue.  But those events often have other vendors clogging them up and little opportunity to engage directly with the partner that you want relationships with.  

Consider creating a niche event that is more innovative and creates an exclusive gathering that entices your partners to attend and because you view them as important in your go-to-market strategy.  More intimate events that give the partner a personal experience and offer the channel team the opportunity to participate in activities directly with the partner are much less expensive than the big blowout. Think a Top Golf outing, wine tasting, or fireside chat with a local celebrity.

And, don't feel you have to go it alone.  There are vendors that offer services that are compatible vs. competitive to yours.  Invite them to co-sponsor and add an educational component that is not product-focused but more industry and market focused.

Create educational, virtual partner events that you can execute for a fraction of the cost of a live event.

Webinars and podcasts continue to be a hot trend in content marketing. They are inexpensive and effective if they are done right.  Make those events short and use your marketing budget to pay an industry thought leader to bring an expert or knowledge perspective vs. focusing on trying to sell your products and services over the web.  People will come to hear the thoughts of people that are different and interesting.  Think about the power of Ted Talks that attract massive audiences.

Consider offering knowledge on the vertical markets your customers exist in, on selling strategies, and on strategies that partners can use in general to grow their business. Virtual events can be delivered with minimal marketing funds because there is no travel involved and no expense in finding a venue, paying for food and drinks, and those pricey giveaways.

Execute a digital strategy to help sales partners market directly to their customers and prospects.

Partners have spent years building customer relationships or creating contacts in their local marketplaces that could become customers.  However, they don’t have the time, creativity or expertise to execute an effective digital marketing strategy.  Allocate your MDF funds to reward partners who are willing to let you help them with a g

Transcript

Convey Micro-Cast Series 

This is Carolyn Bradfield and you’re listening to the Convey Micro-Cast audio series.  

This week is our Halloween Micro-Cast series and we gave Freddy Krueger a shout out by entitling our first episode, the Nightmare on Channel Street.  We identified nightmares in the channel that keep you up at night, can ruin your channel program and destroy your revenue.  So many of you have seen the Walking Dead, that wildly popular series that has lasted for 9 years and filmed in the state of Georgia, Convey’s home.

This episode of the Nightmare on Channel Street starts off easy enough.  Partners are throwing deals to you right and left, asking you for quotes and submitting deals.  But then the nightmare begins.  You’re working way too hard preparing tons of quotes for companies that are just plain wrong for your services.  It’s a nightmare because your entire channel team is totally deployed chasing deals that will never convert, partners are frustrated because they don’t know which prospects meet your standards and your channel is being sucked into a never-ending quoting nightmare.

What looked like good deals are the now the “walking dead”.  How can a channel program hold off those zombies and get deals that will actually convert?  If you want to survive this episode, here is what you can do.

Make sure that sales partners have a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile.

If partners are sending prospects over to you and asking for quotes that never produce a deal, whose fault is it really?  I’ve seen many channel programs complain about the wasted time in quoting bad deals, but not enough programs accepting that they were ones at fault because they never educated the partner on what types of customers are ideal for them. 

Partners need to understand what markets you are strongest in, the size of the company that is right for you, and what type of buyer inside that company you need to talk to.  Convey had a vendor that was getting absolutely no traction with partners for their hosting solution.  When we explored the type of customers they already had, we found out that 65% of them were healthcare organizations because of the HIPAA-compliant platform the company had.  However, their healthcare market focus was never shared with partners, so they had no idea where to focus their efforts.  Once partners were educated, the right deals began to flow through.

Make sure your program has a clear understanding of the ideal partner you want to represent you.

Not every partner that is out there has the customer base, technical expertise, or sales capacity to sell services, yet many channel programs cast a wide net then wonder why they are either ignored by partners or get the wrong referrals.

Convey’s Channel program has over 23,000 sales partners that belong to 40 master agent portals but trying to influence and form relationships with all of them when selling your services that are only appropriate for some of them is a recipe for frustration and un-met expectations on both sides.

And lastly, clearly define the rules of engagement for deal referral or getting a quote.

Partners like a clear understanding of process.  They have hundreds of vendor choices and if they are not clear about how to refer, how to ask for a quote, what information you want, and who to deliver it to, they will make up their own process.  Consider formalizing your referral and quoting process by creating forms to add the information you care about.  Set partners expectation about what you plan to do once you get their information so everyone is on board and on the same page.

Referrals and quote requests from partners don’t have to join the army of the Walking Dead if you ensure that partners know what the ideal cus