With a polished skill set, a strong sense of professionalism and a bit of training, you’ll be able to speak directly to partner businesses’ pain points — and connect the right people with the right resources and solutions.
To do so, you need to first earn credibility the old-fashioned way, by becoming someone your partners can trust and turn to for advice. Getting there is hard work, but it’s all worth it. Start studying your partner businesses to figure out what makes them tick, and then determine how you can improve their bottom line.
Understanding How a Partner Business Makes Money
Step One: Appreciate and Respect the Supply Chain
Consider how each organization, person, task, data point, tool and asset impact the integrity of the process before making any hasty changes or decisions. Resist the temptation to eliminate parts of the supply chain in order to save money or automate processes without fully considering what’s at stake.
Step Two: Pay Attention to Organizational Structure
Take time to understand how your partner business makes money and what they must accomplish in order to turn a profit. From billing and collections to sales and advertising, there’s a lot that has to get done. Remember that a smaller partner might have different needs than an enterprise, and develop strategies and offerings with both in mind.
Step Three: Facilitate Success for the Front End
When consumers visit professional websites on their smartphones, they are enjoying a clean user experience thanks to a lot of work on the front end. What they see is the result of a long process that the customer benefits from, but likely knows very little about. While the front end of a business tends to get all the credit, they share systems with and often need just as much support as the back end, so give them the services and IT infrastructure they need to thrive.
Step Four: Give Credit to the Back End
The back end is everything an ordinary consumer doesn’t see. It’s all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes, and it doesn’t resemble the neatly-packaged front-end presentation that the customer admires. Managing databases, processing orders, handling finance — everything is easier with the right resources, and there are a lot of departments that demand your attention and support.
Step Five: Recognize and Rectify Inefficiencies
As a successful CAM — and emerging business advisor — your job involves helping partners reach long-term goals through a combination of insourcing and outsourcing. Provide clients with the best cloud offerings, the right managed services, industry-specific technology solutions and professional IT support, and you’ll empower them to simplify everything from inventory and customer support to research and development and more.
Step Six: Consult Like the Pro You Are
In your quest to become a top business advisor, you will continue honing your expertise and eventually cultivate a reputation for solving problems on the fly. This may mean establishing yourself as a consultant and conducting business as such. People look to you for advice about how to handle emerging technologies and solve problems in the supply chain, and you’ll want to be able to tell them what to do next. By investing in high-level training, you’re putting yourself in a better position to understand each partner’s business and how you fit into the equation.
What’s Next? Scout Out New Opportunities for Growth!
As you master the art of pleasing every partner business, you’ll become a pro at helping everyone get the quality service they deserve. Consider how the needs of large and small partners differ from one another and develop new offerings that target a partner business’ operations, services, finance, product development, marketing and sales accordingly. To continue building value in a dynamic business world, find innovative ways to connect with partners new and old, and stay relevant by networking, upskilling, outsourcing and knowing when it’s time to bring in professionals who can take things to the next level.
Ready to Elevate?
As a vendor or reseller, working with a partner like Marketopia means that you don’t have to spend your time training and creating lead generation for your partners – let our team of IT industry leaders handle it instead. At Marketopia, we speak the language of the channel and have the expertise it takes to support your business goals. We know the channel inside and out and have designed cutting-edge marketing strategies for CAMs who are ready to grow and build a better future. Let’s Get Started
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