Channel Development

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 wanting to expand your sales force without increasing the number of direct sales reps on staff, an early-stage company looking to reach new vertical markets and locations or a startup trying to avoid the overhead costs associated with an in-house sales force, channel partners can help. These independent, third-party businesses can bring added value to your business and increase your revenues while they grow their own businesses selling your products and services.

But what are you doing to add value to your channel partners’ efforts? The days of throwing some co-op advertising dollars and a logo sheet at your channel partners and leaving them to generate their own leads are long past.

Today, if you want to increase your revenues, you need to collaborate with your channel partners to make their jobs easier. After all, you’re in a battle for their time against all their other priorities.

To accelerate growth, you may want to expand your business geographically. For example, because emerging markets are less mature, they are likely to be on longer growth cycles. While these regions may be attractive, there are risks. These include lack of understanding of:

• Local competition and pricing
• The legal environment
• Delivery channels
• Culture

With a do-it-yourself approach, you’ll have to spend money on overhead items such as new regional offices. To mitigate these risks and move into new markets more rapidly, you can use channel partners. 

Channel partners can grow your sales and spread the message about your products or services. But to have an effective channel partner program, you have to recruit the right channel partners to achieve your goals. This post explores channel development tasks from partner profiling to lead generation and qualification.

While it may seem simpler to sell directly to your clients, if you want to grow more quickly, it makes sense to leverage the power of channel partners. Taking on a new partner, however, requires time and resources. And since you want to make sure you are spending your time wisely, you need to target the right partners. Finding partners that are a perfect match for your company starts with a channel-partner profile. 

A powerful strategy for growth in business-to-business telemarketing is to leverage channel partners to sell your goods and services. It works best when channel partners have connections with the companies you want to sell to; the marketing resources and know-how to reach them; or the ability to add value to your offering. For example, companies such as Oracle, IBM and SAP have created successful channel partner programs with geographically dispersed industry leaders that have solutions’ expertise to reach clients across the globe. Their secrets to success include using business-to-business telemarketing for channel partner profiling, recruiting, support and more.  Discover 7 best practices for success.