Distributor Sales Engagement is a way of driving interaction between you and your distributors – improving the relationship and making them motivated to sell your product(s). Here’s everything you need to know to boost engagement and reach better sales results.
Distributor Sales Engagement includes all the strategies and activities that your company uses – to make sure your distributors are motivated, that they interact with your material and engage with you and your team. The goal of all this is to improve the relationship between you and your distributors and get them to want to sell your product. After all, a distributor may be selling products from both you and your competitors, and your job as a Distributor Sales Leader is to make sure they put your product first. A goal that many indirect sales companies are struggling to reach due to a more crowded market and the challenge of engaging distributors digitally.
That said, there are a number of ways to get distributors to engage with you, to get them motivated to sell your product and put your product first. Ways that we’ll go through here below:
5 ways to boost Distributor Sales Engagement
1. Make it easy to reach you
Create a clear and open communication channel for distributors to share feedback, ask questions and stay connected with you and your company. Forward-thinking distributor sales companies are already working with easy-to-use partner portals where distributors can always pop in to find the latest updates, get answers to urgent questions and remain informed about what is happening in your product lines. Whatever tool or strategy you use to communicate with distributors, the important thing is this: it should be easy to reach you – and easy for you to reach them.
2. Track engagement
Find ways to have oversight of what distributors are interacting with you and end customers, what material they’re sharing with said customers and how their engagement progresses over time. By finding a tool or strategy to maintain this oversight, you can see what distributors may need some help and what distributors stand out among their peers. This will help you make truly data-driven decisions and improve engagement.
3. Incentivice high engagement
Want to take it one step further? if you have a way to track how much distributors are interacting with you, and how much they’re interacting with end customers, you can incentivice this practice. I.e. you can offer select rewards to those that are truly engaged, for example by giving them access to special prices or by sharing new product launches with them first. Something that can help boost that engagement further.
4. Give distributors customized marketing material
Know what can positively destroy distributor engagement? Giving everyone access to the same huge folder of generic marketing material, making them responsible to find what they’re looking for. The alternative is this: provide distributors with customized marketing material and campaigns that are tailored to their specific markets and customer bases. This can be super-customized microsites, co-branded material, localized advertising support and promotional campaigns that truly resonate with the local customers. If you can also give them easy access to this material, and not force them to look through a giant folder to find it, you’re two steps closer to a high distributor engagement that can translate to sales results.
5. Don’t underestimate a smooth experience
Lastly, remember that a smooth and easy distributor experience goes a long way to improve engagement. If you, for example, provide them with a partner portal where they can find the exact information and material they need, where they can ask and receive answers to questions and stay updated about everything that is going on with you and your products, they will be so much more inclined to actually interact with you. Which, in turn, can make them more motivated to put your product first.
Distributor Sales Engagement made easy
With SP_CE, you will get one place to manage and engage all your distributors. Each distributor will get their own unique portal where they can:
- Ask and receive questions in no time – instead of waiting around for an email.
- Get access to shareable marketing material and feel safe knowing it’s the latest and greatest version.
- Get instant notifications when new material is available, or when their questions have been answered.
- Have a way to reach you with one click, no matter where they are in the world.
And the cherry on top? You will save a lot of time on distributor management, while getting full traceability. In other words, you will be able to KNOW, not guess, what material they’re engaging with and what is actually done with it.
We call it a shortcut to distributor engagement. If you want to know more, you can contact us here.