As a vendor, your goal is to remain the logical choice for each of your channel partners. To stay at the forefront of their favor, pay special attention to how you manage the opportunities they present, and strive to understand each of them.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can easily differentiate your channel partners’ models so you can remain successful as a vendor.
Manage the Opportunities
An important thing to remember is that your business as a vendor and your partner’s business are codependent. The more harmoniously you interact, the more competitively you will perform.
You can bolster this relationship by managing the opportunities that each partner offers. This allows you to leverage partners for their value-added capabilities. Managing doesn’t mean taking control of partners, but rather enabling them to run with what they’re doing correctly and helping them amend what is impeding their progress.
Understand How to Make Partners Perform
As a vendor, you will be able to manage channel partners more successfully once you’ve learned to understand each partner. Consider each facet of their operations and how they functionally mesh together. You can do this by examining the following:
The structure, style and priorities that motivate partners. Every partner is unique in their needs, wants and the way they go about satisfying them. Learn how they approach each opportunity and see how you, as a vendor, can improve their tactics.
Partner sales, technical and financial capabilities. Just as their needs and wants are unique, the size and scope of each partner will differ. You must not set standards too high or low, but rather adapt your standards to each partner.
Their business, goals and success. Not every partner makes money the same way, has the same goals or is even in the same type of business. Your job as a vendor must always be to foster growth and success and help them achieve their goals.
The universe of channel partners is a complex and changing place. Partner types, labels and motivations are continually shifting. Your job is to get beyond the words they use and understand what they do, so you, as a vendor, can help them achieve what they want.
Relationships Are Ongoing
Once you’ve audited your relationship with all of your channel partners and put them into effect, you can examine the results to improve the process further. Take a look at how your product or solution benefits each partner. Some good questions to reflect upon include how well you:
- Reinforce each partner’s value proposition
- Sustain each partner’s business model
- Enhance each partner’s commercial operations
- Reward each partner’s unique value and expertise
- Align with each partner’s business development intentions
Partner engagement is built on business alignment and relevance. When you take on the role of an active vendor, it means you know the structural components of your partner types and their business models.
How Marketopia Can Help
If you’re a vendor looking to improve your relationship with channel partners, look no further than Marketopia. Our expert team is well-versed in the IT channel. We understand channel partners and how to optimize the opportunities they present. 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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