Three Tips to Help Your Partners Thrive and Sell More!

It’s a changing world and your partners need more than a contract and set of training certifications to be effective. They need an advocate who can champion their cause throughout your organization while helping to streamline policies and procedures to make their business more efficient.

New partners with unique technologies, often have challenges getting their solutions included into your sales team proposals. This is needed to keep pace with your competitors. What to do?

A New Breed of Integrators – Channel Consultants

When it comes to enabling partners, channel consultants have a toolkit of services that can save your company time and streamline communications while bridging the gap between you and your partners. Channel consultants are a new breed of partner accelerator, and mesh project management, change management and technical expertise specifically geared to partner performance.

Take, for example, an IoT company partnering with a giant like Cisco, and working in multiple verticals such as retail, manufacturing, energy and healthcare. A channel consultant inserted into the process can promote, train and interface between key partners and your sales teams - adding a tremendous amount of value for everyone involved.

Three Tips to Partner Success

Here are three ways a channel consultant adds value and helps bridge the divide between partners:

1. Define Objectives and Track Action Items

Having a channel consultant facilitate partner meetings allows clients more time to focus on details to solidify objectives. During meetings channel consultants keep people on task and track future action items, assignment of responsibilities and much more. The devil is in the details and having one person responsible for defining and tracking these items frees up everyone else to complete the specific tasks required to move the project forward.

2. Champion at the Table

Once objectives are defined, the channel consultant can help champion new strategic partners who may not have the visibility or links into your sales teams. This type of role is tremendously helpful to build awareness within your sales teams of solutions the partner can provide. A channel consultant provides the partner with leverage within your larger organization. By working with partners, aligning meetings and locating the right contacts, the channel consultant also frees up time for partners.

Matt Tyler, Director of IoT at Wachter, an 85+ year old international IT and engineering company, says he was able to free up almost a third of his time based on the work his channel consultant performed, leaving him free to focus on other details.

3. Provide Documentation

Channel consultants can enable partners by providing project documentation and managing project communications. A large project may involve dozens of vendors, multiple partners and hundreds of staff. With this many moving pieces, organization and coordination become critical.

Tyler points out having a channel consultant allowed him time to do the internal selling required to move the project along and to really focus on the in-house details. This in turn allowed his team to build the product and move to market more quickly.

Weekly status updates, documented action items and detailed reports highlighting completed milestones provide tremendous value to everyone involved. All of these services help clients experience quicker go-to-market strategies, earlier introductions with key individuals, more in-depth information and successful branding. And, at the end of the day, the channel consultant is there to work with the team and make getting to market easy for everyone involved.

Learn More

Be sure to check out Sales Beacon's blogs on Partner Enablement to learn more about how we can help you connect with more of your partner network.