Especially in the technology space, sales and marketing are simultaneously the biggest opportunity for increased sales and the biggest gap in being able to increase your revenue.
In order to drive demand through partners and enable them to be better sellers, we’re here to discuss how to best interlock both your marketing and sales at their core to help your business grow.
Picking the Right Partners
As a rule of thumb, businesses within the IT channel align better when each one uses complementary technologies and business practices. With some basic research and general knowledge of your business, it should be fairly simple to select the right partners and help them better understand how to communicate the value of your solutions. The stand-out candidates should have value-added services that go along with the work your company does.
Knowledge Is Power
A crucial step in aligning your channel marketing and channel sales is by educating partners. Teaching them to promote within the channel in the same manner as you do is paramount for success. This can be done by instructing direct sales representatives to share knowledge with indirect peers involved in the process. Establishing this open dialogue will allow you both to embrace mindshare and better support your solutions. This ensures that everyone is clear on the marketing strategy and can effectively pursue and close leads.
Trust and Inclusion
An open dialogue is very important for the successful alignment of your channels. Being collaborative and transparent in business dealings with your partners helps you build a relationship based on trust, which leads to mutual benefits and long-term bonds. This includes having your channel partner representatives up to date with current deals and strategies. Your reps are always an asset and it’s important to keep them working in tandem with your sales team to facilitate the flow of important information.
Reward a Job Well-Done
Invest in your partnerships’ current and future success. Create a sales promotion incentive fund (SPIFF) that will help your partner grow with much-needed funds to build their infrastructure and staff. This will benefit you in the long run as each partner will be equipped to take on more clients and better support your efforts in the channel. Additionally, it doesn’t hurt to reward your in-house sales team. Incentives always boost morale and work ethic in a competitive environment.
Try a PRM
Eventually, your business will reach a point of growth where it will benefit from a partner relationship management system (PRM). This system automates not only your channel sales activities, but also marketing operational tasks and finance and business operations teams. It engages across direct and indirect channels giving a top-down view of partner activity. A PRM facilitates many avenues for vendors to support partners. PRMs are a hit among sales teams for their versatility in managing deal registrations, improving access to marketing development funds and sales promotion incentive funds, and tracking opportunity milestones.
How Marketopia Can Help
Marketopia’s expert team has the know-how to get your sales and marketing channels working together better than ever before. Get in contact with us today and see how we can help your business achieve more leads, more sales and more profits.
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