Simply enabling your partners is oftentimes not enough to reach success with an indirect sales model. Instead, this success often comes from engaging your partner continuously and having a central place to communicate and nurture the relationship. Here’s everything you need to know.
Succeeding with an indirect sales model can be hard. Your partners are probably working with a lot of products, and you need to earn mindshare and make sure that your product is first in line. To do this, it’s oftentimes not enough to just enable your partner by giving them the material they need. Instead, you need to activate them continuously and grow the relationship over time. Here are three ways to do this:
1. Give your partners a central place for all communication
To continuously engage partners, they need to know where they can find and communicate with you. By establishing a central place for communication where you can chat, answer questions and communicate updates, you can continuously engage and activate your partners and keep the conversation going. It also gives you a chance to make sure that all stakeholders have gotten notified of updates and can ask the questions they need. Including product managers, sales reps and marketing teams, who can all be included in an ongoing conversation where questions can be answered swiftly. This, in turn, decreases the risk of miscommunication, delays, or missed updates. Making you and your partner an efficient team that work together toward a common goal.
2. Have a mutual action plan
To keep your partner engaged, active and accountable, you can find a way to keep a mutual action plan located in the same place you communicate. There, you can both define goals, discuss strategies, and outline actionable steps that will bring both of you success. By documenting these plans, continuously discussing them and having historical data on what’s been done, you and your partner can easily refer back to them, track progress, and hold each other accountable.
When it comes to keeping your partner active remotely, it can be a true game-changer. It builds a joint sense of accountability and can help you nurture a relation that brings both of you significant benefits. Just like the best partnerships should.
3. Let your partner experience your product
You want your partner to truly buy into your product and be encouraged to promote it. One way to do this is to give them a way to experience your product in the same way your (potential) customers will. Something that, for example, can mean that you share a beautiful product experience through different media formats, such as video, 3D animations and presentations. If you can share these dynamically in the same place you communicate, and make the experience something out of the ordinary, odds are your partner will be encouraged to focus their attention on you and your product.
Think of your partner like you would think about your customer: they need different things, but one thing they both need is to experience your product.
With SP_CE you can control partner interactions and maintain your message and compliancy at each step of the way. Our platform gives you
- 1 central, digital room that your partner can share with customers – filled with the right product message and material. Material that you can keep automatically updated through a robust version control.
- 1 room to collaborate with your partner and keep them active with regular updates. Making sure your partner isn’t just enabled but also engaged.
That way, you and your partners get the ultimate conditions to succeed. Read more about SP_CE for partner enablement here, find more information in our Channel Sales FAQ – or contact us to see how SP_CE can boost your partner sales.
