Breaking Into the Channel: Expert Insights on Getting It Done
…overnight, she said. “This will take at least a year. You might get an opportunistic sale, but it won’t be truly up and running until the partners are trained to sell your product. Only then can they go out and sell to your customers.”
And on those first visits, Gravel said that companies should send out their own salespeople to go on those initial calls with the partners. “I advise you to go out with them because you know how to sell your product,” she said. “I would not expect for a brand new channel partner to sell anything of any large degree in the first year.”
The work toward that goal, however, is worth it, she said, because in a crowded marketplace, companies need the leverage of the channel to find broad success.
“Most companies can’t hire enough salespeople to get their products out there,” said Gravel. And the cost for the average salesperson can be about $200,000 a year in salary, benefits and more, which can be money saved when working with channel partners.
Another way to connect with the channel starting from scratch is to poach a channel professional from a company that is in a market similar to yours and put their experience to immediate good use, said Gravel.
“If you really want to go after the channel, you are going to have to hire someone to do this project,” she said. “That should come first. You should have someone who works for you who knows how to do it. Then you start approaching the customers and approaching the partners. A channel person is going to know best how to do things with a third party. There has to be trust there. There has to be training there, to create these relationships.”
David Van Everen, the senior vice president of marketing for open source cloud application services vendor Mirantis, said his company followed a similar path in creating its own partner program in the last few years. Most of the company’s business is direct today, but the channel operations are continuing to expand.
Mirantis brought in its first vice president of alliances in 2015 to help establish its go-to-market strategy, including a channel partner program that was started from scratch, said Van Everen. “He had worked with channels for a decade,” which helped the program immensely.
“The challenge for Mirantis was navigating the channel partners that we could actually work with,” he said “As a provider of software to large service providers, like cloud hosting companies, we had to be careful not to compete with those partners.”
When starting to seek out channel partners, the key is to pitch a group of target partners and give them compelling reasons for them to be partners, said Van Everen.
“You have to look at the channel the same way you look at customers,” he said. “Think about what your value proposition is. Going through that will help focus on what channel partners you need to work with in your case.”