Did you know that nearly 30% of partners said inadequate sales support was a reason for regretting joining a channel program? It was the fourth most frequently cited reason.
Source: 2019 State of Partnering Study/PartnerPath
It’s critical that vendors provide partners with easy access to sales enabling materials when, where, and how they like them. Diane Krakora, founder and principal of PartnerPath, a leading channel consulting company, discusses this challenge.
She says, “Salespeople generally prefer just-in-time learning. They don’t want to learn anything until they need it. But when they need it, they need it and they want it to be easy to find and only what they’re looking for. So, it’s important that sales enablement platforms provide the easiest anywhere/anytime access to content, in digestible chunks. Vendors often make the mistake of packaging their onboarding or sales training information into long-format videos, documents, or presentations.”
According to her, vendors should equip their partners with sales-enabling content they can access any time, anywhere. “Vendors should make their materials readily available — especially remotely — in bite-size nuggets. “Here’s the value proposition. Here’s how you determine a need. Here’s how you handle objections,” she said. “The best-practice is to break the content down and make it available on a user-friendly platform.”
Mindmatrix’s client, ESET North America, an IT-security company is doing this really well. To keep the momentum from a record 40% year-over-year increase in channel partner growth in 2017, ESET is continually updating its ESET Marketing Center with materials designed to support partner sales reps with customer-focused information.
Lead-tracking capabilities enable ESET’s channel team to monitor customer interaction to ensure high-potential leads are being addressed, explained Kristina Hodge, the company’s Partner Marketing Manager. “As soon as a lead comes in the owner of that account will receive an email for them to go in and view what’s going on with the lead.”
Providing partners with a user-friendly platform and other sales-enabling services is helping the company attract and retain partners, Hodge said. “One of our best value propositions is that we try to make it as easy as possible for our partners. Whenever they need help with anything, we’re here to help.”
At the end of the day, we all know that in a highly competitive, multi-vendor environment, partners gravitate more towards vendors whose products and services are the easiest to sell. Want to become your channel partner’s most-preferred vendor? Check out Mindmatrix’s partner sales enablement tools here.
