Building Sales Channels – What do you want from a sales partner?

Target Audience: For software companies / ISVs who are starting in sales channels, regardless of company size or experience. If you are thinking about sales partners, want to recruit sales partners, or have some partners and want more, then read on.

Do you remember when you could order a coffee and you got a coffee? BUT NOW you have multiple choices; Filtered, Americano, Latte, Latte, Cappuccino, Mocha, Flat White OR what origin Arabica, Colombia, Guatemala… and you could get them all in skinny too. AND it’s not small, medium or large it’s Tall, Grande and some bigger size (bucket!).

So, then you should understand that the question, “what do you want from a sales partner?”, is not as simplistic as it sounds. Yes, you likely simply want more sales, but this needs to be much more detailed.

Three Sales Channel Planning fundamentals to consider, for now:

1) Your Business Process and Growth Bottlenecks
What do you want more of in your business?
What capability if you had it would enable your business to grow faster?

• Is it credible introductions to decision-makers, that enable you to walk in the door and be trusted?
• Is it more leads or more qualified leads?
• Is it the ability to understand the customers’ needs and formulate how to solve those needs with an effective plan and proposal?
• Is it sales capability to help close deals?
• Is it credibility, or brand, along with a strong service team in delivering success for your target customers?
• Is it technical support capability in a market that understands the language and culture of the region?
• Do you want to retain customer ownership or are you happy with sell-through resellers partners?

As you can see the questions above are going across a typical sales and delivery business process.

What is your primary bottleneck in your selected target markets that sales partners can help you with?

2) Your Requirements from Sales Partners

• What types of customers should they be selling to?
• What size of deals should they be comfortable with?
• What technical or sector domain expertise should they have in sales and in implementation or delivery?
• Should they have marketing capability? Support capability?
• Do you want them to do everything along with the marketing, sales, delivery, and support?
• What training will they need from you?
• How much business do you expect? Once up to speed, how many deals do you expect, per quarter, per month?
• How long and how much time should partners invest in selling your product before they see a return on that investment?

3) How many sales partners do you want?

• Do you want one partner or multiple partners to cover each region?
• Do you want the partner to invest heavily in creating a market for your product?
• Do you want your partners to be actively competing against others to win business?
• Do you have a revenue or number of ‘new customer wins’ expectation from the market and maybe that may determine the number of partners?

Long ago, when coffee was just coffee, and the world wasn’t connected with the internet and social, the IT distributor channels were the dominant route to market for software solutions. This is not the case anymore and the route to market choices are much more plentiful with many solutions being sold direct.