Here’s What Effective Channel Engagement Looks Like
Sales managers understand that channel partner engagement is the lifeblood of successful indirect sales. The more effective your channel partner engagement program, the easier it is for your distributors to do their job of selling and servicing your products every day.
Market fluctuations and rapidly changing customer needs, however, have created an increasingly challenging environment for manufacturers. Meeting these challenges requires strong partner relationships. A company with disengaged channel partners will be poorly positioned to outmaneuver their competitors. Open dialogue and strong partnerships foster the collaboration and innovation necessary for success. That’s why effective communication is such an important element of channel management.
But the nature of the indirect sales model — you may be doing business with resellers around the globe — complicates this effort. Beyond geography, partners and resellers typically work with multiple suppliers making it even more important that your engagement plan stands out and builds partner loyalty.
Once established, a good engagement strategy has numerous benefits, including:
- Improved productivity and distribution numbers,
- Increased sales and commission numbers for dealers,
- More successful advertising and marketing campaigns, and
- Improved customer service along the entire channel.
All organizations these days are dealing with an overwhelming amount of information on a regular basis. Whether that information gets to the right person at the right time, without being perceived as burdensome, is the difference between effective channel communication and wasting your time (and theirs).
When creating and executing a partner engagement plan, there are a few key communication tips to keep in mind:
Be timely. To be effective, communications can’t be burdensome. Communications that are too frequent can get lost in the shuffle or leave the partner feeling overloaded. If the communications are not seen as helpful and supportive, they become useless. Consider adopting mobile-friendly communication tools that provide easy access to relevant information.
Be relevant. One of the key communication mistakes is caused by sending “blanket” information addressed to the entire sales network. It’s then left to the individual partners and their individual departments to sift through the information, looking for anything relevant to them. To be effective, communications must be contextual. It should provide contextual information to the channel partner by deal stage, product line, customer type, or geography. The criteria doesn’t matter as much as being able to segment and supply information based on their individual needs.
Strike a balance. Sending information too early only adds to the overload that your partners may be experiencing. The longer the information sits before it becomes relevant, the greater the chance that it will be forgotten or misplaced. Alternatively, information that is sent too late is useless to your dealers. A careful balancing act is required. The more effective your overall communication strategy, the easier the balancing act becomes.
A distributor lead management software system improves your ability to execute targeted and helpful communications with your channel partners. With a lead management system designed specifically for distributor engagement, channel partners will have instant access to timely, context-based product information at their fingertips. As a result, your channel partners will feel informed, supported, and valued — the critical link to building strong partner engagement.
