Bagging the Right Channel Partners For Your Business

Channel Partner Management is very complicated and a tedious job; monitoring all aspects of indirect sales is already difficult, more if you have a handful of inactive partners. Recruiting partners is crucial in the long term and screening them is quite difficult since they can easily fool any business company by bragging they got really good “connections”. Now as a manager who handles indirect sales, how will you determine the posers from the real deal?

I remember back then when I was watching a hunter on the Discovery channel, he was saying: “To catch an animal, you have to think like one! You need to foresee how they will react. You need to find out what they need and use it to make them come to you”. It makes sense actually and it applies on the recruitment of people to resell and distribute your products.

You have to know what indirect sales people want to promote. They are looking for products that can sell but at the same time, they gain more than just profit. Ask yourself: “What are the criteria they use in choosing their supplier over that of the competitors?” To put it simply, they are looking at products or services that they can initiate in the market as if they were launching their own market leading brand. The thing is most manufacturing companies forget that resellers and distributors also look forward to what will the product give them. That is why it is called a partnership.

A good channel partner is looking for a supplier who is leading in their home or international market. Why? Because they want to keep a good reputation by distributing goods that will add value and increase their ranking. Now, what if your company is just starting up and is still developing a brand? Carefully negotiate to sign up with a well known channel that will boost the product’s validity in the market. However this is quite difficult since your company will be competing with larger companies with for their “mindshare”. By providing better collateral and sales tools you could stay in front of your distributors.

Partners are like women; they are very choosy and picky when selecting their suppliers. They require products and services that are competitive after it has been released on the local market. In this way, it goes back to distributor discounts they will expect. They also expect that their international suppliers have a clear and documented partnership plan; in which case, expectations and obligations of both parties are clearly stated.

Most these partners do not want obvious channel conflicts, they want a clear workflow. They do not want a grueling uphill work to be successful, keep in mind that they are not doing this to help but they are doing it to make money out of your resources.

The problem with most suppliers or manufacturing companies is that they think or resellers and distributors are merely salesmen. Well that is not how partnership it defined; it is a give and take relationship, an equivalent trade on both parties. To make sure that they will be loyal to the company and will not turn over to the competitor, channel partner management is very essential.

For more information about channel management software, you can visit Channeltivity.com website.

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