Recruiting Channel Partners

Recruiting channel partners can be critical to your business. Channels are the means by which you sell products to your customers. Selling direct is a channel, but it may not yield the highest return for your company, so you may want to recruit channel partners to help you go to market.

The reasons for having partners may be to decrease costs, enter markets, complete your solution, or account penetration. Indirect channels come in many types, such as resellers, value added resellers, distributors, independent software vendors and others, and they all perform differently.

Recruiting Considerations

When recruiting channel partners, start with both your needs and your customers requirements in mind. Consider your channel objectives, and your customer's preferred buying processes and buying experience.

Using your business objectives as a guide, formulate the reasons you want to have partners and specifically what you want them do for your business before you start to recruit. Also determine your cost goals and tolerances, and your revenue and unit sales targets.

On the customer side, think about the kind of buying process and buying experience your customers prefer. How does each customer segment prefer to buy? How much interaction do your customers need before they buy? How will they pay, and what level of post sales support do your customers require? The answers to these questions will help you determine the important characteristics when recruiting channel partners.

Recruitment Characteristics and Criteria

On the partner side, look at the geography, industries, and accounts they cover. Look for partners that have certain expertise. Also consider the target markets and territories each prospective partner covers.

As you evaluate a partner company, here are three key characteristics to consider.

1. Business and operational characteristics: These are things like financial strength, shipping and receiving, invoicing, how well they are managed, image, and other non-sales activities.
2. Sales and marketing characteristics: Consider their reach, coverage, current revenue, sales competence, marketing expertise, product enhancement, solution knowledge and effectiveness of their sales operations.
3. Strategic fit characteristics: Ask yourself if they will be committed to your success. Will they collaborate with you, and share strategic plans? Will they make you an important part of their business and allocate appropriate time, energy and resources?

Your partners will have various strengths and combinations of the above traits. Decide the attributes you need and then group and grade the potential partner.

Target and Engage Select Key Partners

Plan your engagement with the prospects you identify. Here is a list of considerations:

• Describe your business proposal in detail
• Prepare your negotiation plan including your win-win argument for both sides
• Identify the range of financial parameters and the discounts you are willing to trade
• Script your initial message ahead of meeting to ensure you cover all critical issues
• Record, review and revise your efforts as you progress and learn

Onboard and support

Once you have chosen your channel partners and come to a mutually beneficial agreement, it is critical to have a plan to initiate the partnership. Here are some things you must consider:

• Create a joint go to market plan
• Develop solutions together that fit the needs of the marketplace
• Focus on agreed targets, marketing and joint development
• Monitor opportunities and sales results
• Grow your relationship and support your partner in critical areas
• Hold regularly scheduled meetings to review issues, progress and direction

In conclusion, recruiting channel partners can and should be very profitable for your business. Target the right partner companies, be certain they are a cultural and business fit, plan the relationship and finally support your partner.

Be sure to read the articles on channel marketing and channel sales to learn more about making your channel program a success.

Related Articles

• Channel Partner Planning
• Channel Management
• Channel Marketing
• Channel Sales

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