How To Leverage Channel Partnerships To Drive Growth

Eugene Xiong is the Founder and Chairman of the Board of Foxit, a leading provider of innovative PDF products and services.

Channel partnerships can be one of your organization’s most essential assets for promoting your product in the market and driving revenue. These partners already have their own established customer base and should have a much further reach than your direct sales team. Ultimately, strong channel partners can positively impact your corporate and product reputation and ensure a good customer experience across a wider range of markets and use cases.

But a channel partnership is like any other relationship: It needs to be appropriately nurtured to be mutually successful. Both sides must share the same or similar visions, and trust needs to be built over time. If you can’t build and maintain a strong relationship with your partners, you can expect a reduction of sales, a failed partnership and, ultimately, erosion of your brand.

In essence, you reap what you sow. Strong channel partnerships have the power to maximize your brand’s coverage, but they can only go as far as the commitment you’re willing to put in. With these challenges in mind, here are three tips to leverage your channel sales to drive growth.

Invest time in your channel.

Think about your direct sales team. As your organization’s primary revenue drivers, they need to have an in-depth understanding of your product. So, you equip them with as much quality intel as possible. The latest product details, ideal customer profiles, marketing materials and training all act as powerful tools account executives need to sell successfully.

That same approach applies to your channel partners. You should treat your channel partners as an extension of your own sales team and put the same amount of effort, content and resources toward them. In fact, as third-party sellers without that established product knowledge, you need to ensure that they’re 100% armed with everything needed to sell to their base. Unlike your own sales team, which deals only with what you have, channel partners sell more than just your product and likely have other competitor products in the mix. The more training and support they receive, the greater likelihood of your brand being promoted over others.

But there’s more to it than that. Investing quality time in the partnership will help you stand out among the crowd. For instance, setting up a weekly check-in with your partners to provide product or company updates or new insights will demonstrate that you are committed to building this relationship by keeping them well-informed.

Another way to nurture your partnerships is by making yourself available when they need you. That could be accepting an invitation to speak at one of their trade events, attending the occasional social dinner or scheduling a coffee meetup if you are in town. These activities don’t immediately increase sales, but they do help build stronger rapport with channel partners over time.

The strongest partnerships are never strictly transactional. Just as putting a face to a name can help, putting a relationship to a product will ensure that its sales team will associate you with the product, leading to higher revenue potential.

Reward value-add appropriately.

Adding the right incentives for reaching various performance goals is another way to motivate the channel to prioritize selling your products over others. Sure, you can always use cash bonuses, but you’d have to increase the amount to maintain partner motivation levels continuously. You’ll also find that excitement for cash incentives may diminish over time.

Instead, think outside the box and offer rewards that are meaningful to them and that they’re inspired to work toward. For instance, the first seller to reach a specified sales volume target by the end of the quarter might receive an all-expense paid trip for two to a destination of their choosing. A non-cash reward like this removes the hassle a would-be top seller would experience if they had to plan the trip themselves.

Perhaps you would like your partner’s team to understand your brand’s offerings more deeply. If 100% of their sales team have completed your training and have gotten certified, you might organize a restaurant dinner for the group’s achievement.

Rewards are great because they nudge channel sales to go the extra mile while demonstrating that you’re deeply invested in the partnership’s success. Assuming you already have a working relationship with your channel partners, you’ll know what kinds of rewards will motivate them and thus turbo-charge your channel sales efforts.

Be flexible with your partners.

As is the case in any long-term relationship, there will be ups and downs. Conflicts will eventually arise, and it takes patience and flexibility to resolve them.

In your regular communication forum with partners, actively listen to their feedback and input regarding your sales enablement material, your level of support or the general dynamic of the relationship. You might initially feel defensive, but this is counterproductive to trust-building. Instead, you want to adopt a “partner-first” mentality and afford some flexibility to accommodate the partnership.

Where appropriate, be open to implementing some changes to your partner program. After all, the partnership’s success heavily depends on what you put into it. Your partners will feel understood and supported if you apply the right flexibility. They will appreciate and remember your brand’s ability to adjust as needed, giving you more significant mindshare and directly impacting future revenue.

It’s easy to forget that your partners have their own challenges independent of you and that they are working with other vendors. It’s tempting to think that you’re their only priority. That’s why it’s essential to invest the time and effort to leave a strong impression and make them feel the same way you do.

If you invest in the relationship correctly, your partners become more reliable and will have a steady hand in maximizing your brand’s coverage and growth.

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