A recent poll that Mindmatrix conducted during a webinar revealed that the single biggest request vendors receive from their partners today is for marketing and sales support. 43% of vendors reported that their partners seek sales and marketing support the most from them. While most of the vendors already recognize the importance of offering sales and marketing support to their partners, they still make mistakes when it comes to actually providing support. That is because a lot of vendors have one big misconception about how to support partners in sales and marketing. A lot of them believe providing channel partners with basic product training, a partner portal, and sales and marketing content is equivalent to offering excellent partner marketing and sales support, when in fact, it is not. All of these elements are essential to partner marketing and sales success, but there’s more to it. Vendors need to really help their partners to sell. That means, vendors need to help partners with
- Building their local brand–How are your partners going to be successful in selling your products if their own brand is weak and not trusted in the market they operate?
- Lead generation–The corporate marketing team has a lot of tools and resources at their disposal to fuel lead-gen. Vendors can leverage their corporate marketing resources to generate leads and divert them to the local channel partners
- Lead nurturing for leads that are not hot–Channel partners are often too busy working in their business to work on it. They are busy selling what sells instantly. They don’t have the time it takes to educate a lead about your product subtly and convince them to make a purchase. Vendors need to do it for them!
- Closing–Vendors should offer support to partners to close their leads by offering a guided sales process that includes timely, personalized course-of-action recommendations.
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