Top 5 Ways To Support Your Partner Community

I often think…”How the world has changed”. In times gone by, suppliers could visit their business channel partners drop product marketing material off, have a cup of tea and a bun and say go and sell. Unfortunately, for an old head like me, we’re not there today. In this generation where everything is fast moving and new products being created, the channel partners have so much information, that they find it hard to separate the signals from the noise. We are in a highly competitive market and as software vendors we need to work hard to make sure our products are front of mind over the others. A central part of this is delivering reseller support throughout the sales process.

Here are 5 ways in which I believe we need to support our partner community.

1. Be agile & efficient to you partners requests

Do this by responding quickly and effectively to requests. Being agile means working collaboratively with a team or business partner. For instance, you need to learn how to respond quickly to partners, respect the rules of engagement and respect the autonomy of the channel. Being agile internally means delegating to members of the team, empowering them and aligning internal processes to your new way of working. Agile can give you more flexibility as long as you’re prepared to be flexible.

2. Provide training support

Software companies should be able to provide training and support. Effective training is essential to empower your staff get the most from your business systems. At Eureka, we offer training that is tailored to your organisation’s needs.

3. Deliver marketing and sales support

If you specialise in developing and selling software solutions you should have access to exclusive sales and marketing resources to help you increase commercial opportunities and stand out from the crowd. Also to support your partner community, you need to feed the partners with relevant product marketing material including, online webinars, events, seminars etc.

4. Incentivise the Business Partner sales teams i.e. good margins

A channel incentive campaign offers partners something that motivates, rouses or encourages specific behaviour. A well executed channel incentive program creates a virtuous circle in which both channel partner and vendor are motivated to collaborate to attain improved performance and achieve per-defined goals.

5. Deliver good after sales service

For many customers, after-sales service is what makes one supplier stand out from another, often more than product or price. Good customer service can attract new business and can create a loyal customer base. At Eureka one of our values is customer service, so we make it our mission to provide, all customers not just resellers, excellent support, knowledge and reactiveness.

What other ways do you think we could support our partner community? Tell me in the comments box below.

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