In today’s environment, if B2B organizations are going to make it, they need to grow. Partnerships can be a big help.
One thing all companies have in common is the need for growth. For most, it is about revenue growth and for others, it is more about impact or influence. A fast pace offers a competitive advantage in the markets that would otherwise take months or years to bring about. Yet achieving sustainable fast growth purely through a company’s own resources is an enormous challenge. B2B companies in particular can benefit from partnering with other companies to help drive their growth.
For B2B technology companies especially, growing revenue through channel partners (Resellers, VARs, Distributors, System Integrators, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Channel consultants can be a highly effective business strategy to pursue.
Formalizing the partnering process through a channel partner program is essential to rapidly scaling a business through third parties. A channel partner program brings systems, structure and templates to create a coherent channel strategy that can be implemented systematically.
A channel partner can be defined as a company that partners with a manufacturer or vendor to market and sell the vendor’s products, services, or technologies. This is usually done through a co-branding relationship. Channel partners may be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, systems integrators (SI), technology deployment consultancies, and value-added resellers (VARs) and other such organizations.
The channel partner is part of the vendor’s indirect sales force, meaning that they sell the products and services on behalf of the vendor but they are an independent company. They may also sell products and services produced by other vendors as well as items they develop themselves.
The right channel partners have the market knowledge, distribution channels, sales expertise, templates and customer relationships to successfully sell your products and/or services. Managing these relationships can be a very complex and time consuming task and significantly impacts profitability. Finding ways to improve channel partner sales training is clearly a factor of success.
The Channel Institute partnered with Impertion, a channel-specific demand generation company, to discover what marketing content is most valued by business-to-business (B2B) technology buyers during the sales process.
The survey results will add to the growing library of data for the B2B buyer’s journey, especially for the technology marketing sector. Many marketers often use templates to plan their buyer’s journey and this research will feed into this aspect of channel partner sales training.
Few universities teach indirect or channel sales, which is posing challenges for employers that want to expand channel services. An over-reliance on field sales and marketing skills has limited the effectiveness of channel partner programs and technology employers in particular have had enough.
Channel partners are typically less sophisticated than vendors in sales and marketing techniques and also have much fewer resources. Channel sales training teams need to find simpler ways for channel partners to implement sales campaigns that better meet their buyer’s needs.
In particular, marketers need to build better stories and more compelling channel sales content around tools such as ROI and TCO calculators, vendor comparison tools, templates and workshops that combine use-specific demos with free software trials.
According to Channel Institute director Michael Kelly, a recurring theme from the research was the skepticism that B2B technology buyers have in relation to vendor content and claims. This was seen as pervasive across channel partner programs.
This may be summed up by one respondent’s request for “The truth! Not the marketing angles where everything out there will reduce costs and improve revenues and profit”.
It is clear from the survey that credibility of content is top of mind for B2B technology buyers. Vendors clearly need to build channel partner sales training tools that makes it easier and faster for partners to build compelling content that matches the buyer’s journey for their solutions.
Independence of source for marketing content is important, which is why they look to third-party communities to find content and discuss both content and solutions with their peers.
The Channel Institute and Impertion received more than 300 fully completed responses from senior technology buyers.When asked to choose “Which educational content do you prefer to receive from technology vendors?” the results were, in order of preference:
- Free trials
2. Demos
3. Videos
4. Calculators (ROI, TCO, etc)
5. How-to Guides and Templates
6. E-Books
7. Case Studies
8. Independent Research
9. White Papers
The question was deliberately aimed at understanding the “Middle-of-the-funnel” – i.e. the “Evaluation” phase in the buyer’s journey.
The results show a clear preference for practical tools and templates to help inform and evaluate.
When asked for general feedback on what other content in channel partner programs would be useful for business technology buyers to shortlist vendors, responses included:
- Comparison sheets versus other vendors and solutions
- Cloud environments for testing
- Proof of concept workshops on real use cases, and VM workshops
- Customer results statements
- Implementation history. What was easy, what was difficult, how did we overcome the difficulties?
- Free and independent assessments
- Webinars
- Online buyer reviews
About the Channel Institute:
The Channel Institute is the only training body in the world that provides business training and certification specifically for the channel profession through a syllabus validated by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council. The Institute currently offers three certificate courses supporting channel managers, channel marketers and channel resellers:
- The Certificate in Channel Management
- The Certificate in Channel Marketing
- The Certificate in Digital Co-Marketing
The Channel Institute also licenses its course content to universities and vendor training academies to bolster their channel training libraries.