Breaking Into the Channel: Expert Insights on Getting It Done
…built specifically to monitor children, who have different health care monitoring requirements than adults. The company also manages the delivery of the iPads to patient families and the pickup of the devices when the family is finished with them.
“I think that getting to the channel is all about the right time and place for us,” said Koshansky.
Locus Health’s conundrum is not uncommon, said Tina Gravel, the senior vice president of global channels and alliances for data center operator and cybersecurity vendor, Cyxtera.
Gravel, a longtime IT channel veteran, said that smaller companies that want to establish relationships with channel partners have several options for making it happen. Companies that have some money to spend on the effort can pay to work with a distributor or master agent who can help them find interested partners that are a good fit and get them trained and up to speed, she said. For companies that don’t have money to spend on this, they need to first analyze their needs and desires to determine if they are actually ready to be in the channel. Then they need to define their ideal customer profile and talk to similar customers they have already done business with so they can ask for customer references, she explained.
“Have you figured out the sales motion so you can transfer it to a partner so they can help sell it for you?” asked Gravel. “If a company hasn’t figured this out for themselves, the channel will never be able to absorb it.”
The idea, she said, is to figure out on your own who your ideal partners could be to start with, said Gravel.
“Then what you’re going to do is call those partners and say you were talking to hospital A and that they suggested that partner would be a good target for them,” she said. “That will pique the partner’s interest because you are talking to their customers. They can’t help but be interested in what you are doing.”
Inside large partner companies, some poking around needs to be done to find just the right people to talk with about becoming partners, Gravel said. “At smaller partner companies, you start with the CEO. You call them. You start as high in the organization as you possibly can to speak with someone.”
If a company does have the ability to pay to work with a distributor to gain channel partner relationships, it can be worth the money, said Gravel.
At Cyxtera, which today has a successful and growing channel partner network, they didn’t initially have any relationships with global systems integrators, so they talked to some of their established early customers and got the names of some of the channel partners their customers were already working with, Gravel said.
“We still do that,” she said. “We do a lot of work in the channel and we want them to tell us who they want to work with.”
The process of finding and establishing those initial channel partner relationships won’t happen…