1. Know your true value
What are your strengths and your real competitive advantage? Do you have a product that is not only unique but for which there is also a demand? Are you the lowest cost provider or do you add value through the expertise of your sales and pre-sales support. So many suppliers to the channel kid themselves they can charge a premium because of their service wrap and the quality of their salespeople. In actual fact the resellers they serve would outsell any of the ‘experts’ their suppliers put up as their ‘value-add’ and few would put them in front of their customers. If you are offering leads to your channel Partners then don’t over-promise and if you also operate a direct channel then know that this will raise concerns and address them head-on.
2. Understand your customer
Who are your channel partners selling to? Their existing base? New prospects? Do they have channel partners of their own? How many salespeople do they have? What do they do and how good are they? How strong is the relationship and influence between your partner and their customers? How many customers do they have and how big are they? What do they buy from them? The successful entrepreneurs amongst your channel partners have a plan and it might be worth asking them what it is.
3. Cut out the hyperbole
In the 30+ years I have spent in the communications industry I have witnessed the birth of many new products and the death of even more. Despite this volatile and cyclical environment the best companies (the ones you want as channel partners) have survived and thrived. This product or technology your company is betting the farm on is not ‘the best’ and what it replaces is not ‘the worst’. Things take much longer than you think and we all know the resellers that don’t adopt something by tomorrow will not actually be ‘dead’ by Thursday. This hysterical rhetoric is common amongst suppliers, especially those with an agenda.
4. A little humility please
I went to an industry conference recently. The experts that were paid to speak were in the main fascinating, in sharp contrast to some of the middle managers put up by the sponsors. One in particular stood out, walking around the stage as if he were Bill Gates, lecturing a room of the UK’s most successful communications entrepreneurs on how to run their businesses. Here is someone that has never taken that ultimate risk himself, never re-mortgaged his house to make payroll and probably never given up a weekend for a customer.
5. Get to the point!
Don’t think of resellers as buying your product, more that they are selling it. The price is only important if it prevents the reseller from winning the business against the competition at a reasonable margin. There are so many offerings in the marketplace that the first thing resellers want to know is how yours stacks up against the others, what its unique features are and what it costs. The channel operates on pull demand which means that most resellers sell things to their customers that they already know they need. I recently sat through a 30 minute presentation from BT where not only did they not say what their new product cost, they also left out what the technology was and its main features. I left my card for them to follow up and as yet nobody has been in touch with me.
Jola is dedicated to the channel and offers the best-priced connectivity products from all the major networks, a differentiated Premium Broadsoft platform and compelling SIM-only deals.
