As Channel Partners, you would have experienced a major shift in the customer engagement model. Your customers are doing their due diligence almost entirely online, long before any sales person enters the picture. The traditional ‘Push’ sales model is losing its effectiveness and your sales persons are in need of different resources to be successful. In this blog, we share what some of our blue-chip vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and HP, are doing to help you optimize your sales force capability as well as improve profitability in the new sales model.
1. Enabling Your Sales Force through Gamification
Continual learning helps to ensure that your sales force can apply the best technologies to match evolving business requirements. To get ahead of the ‘Game’, many vendors are now using gamification strategies for enablement purposes. This method of enablement allows your sales force to learn and get rewarded in a fun environment while you get visibility of their progress!
For example - Microsoft: For Presales role, play an online Azure game that helps you learn about the solution while also having some competitive fun. There is also an Azure learning path to help you sell Azure to small and medium business (SMB) customers.
2. Building a Profitable Business Hand-in-Hand
Building a Partner Ecosystem Platform for partners to promote their solutions to potential customers and look for like-minded companies to collaborate with, is now a trending vendor’s initiative. Compared to incentives or rebates, this tends to be more sustainable and can generate higher ROI in the long run.
Cisco and Microsoft are both leading in this area, with Cisco Marketplace built for their partners to showcase solutions and find ISVs for collaboration purposes and Microsoft Pinpoint Portal that provides an open commerce platform for partners to market and sell technology and cloud solutions to small and mid-size business customers. Included in this portal is a lead management component, where partners can easily track and qualify pipeline with ease!
3. Engaging the Experts – Working with your Marketing Service Providers
Exclusive Marketing Service Providers have been specially assembled by your vendor to support your marketing execution. By engaging them, it does not only allow you to better focus on building your business strategy but also, enable you to leverage on a talent pool of experts who may have marketed similar solutions and are highly familiar with your vendor’s co-branding requirements. Vendors such as Microsoft have an exhaustive list of marketing service providers that can provide just about any support you need, from building blogs to generating leads through events or telemarketing. To maximize your returns when engaging any one of these providers, it is important that you consider their reach geographically vis-à-vis local capabilities, as well as mine their marketing knowledge for your success.
Keen to uncover more of how you can leverage your vendor’s resources? Download our updated and revised ‘A Partner Co-Marketing Guide for Technology Reseller’ now!
