Channel partner recruitment can be a monumental task but finding the right partners is essential to any company that relies on the channel to sell their products.  The ability to seamlessly add partners to your channel eliminates costly overhead and can increase revenue dramatically.  You will want to ensure you are recruiting companies that fit the correct industry focus, geographical areas, selling capacity and customer base, amongst several other factors.  Having a structured step by step process that takes you all the way from identifying potential partners to onboarding them is the best way to ensure your company establishes profitable partnerships.

Guidelines

The first step in finding your ideal partner is to establish a set of guidelines and develop a persona that identifies key traits of your optimal reseller.  You’ll want to ensure your partner has a strong foothold in your specific industry.  Having a solid demand generation process established is especially important when looking at the traits of a potential partner. Your partner will have to have your desired sales skill-set as well as the necessary bandwidth in order to maximize your channel.  Companies that already have a loyal customer base within your industry should garner strong consideration as a potential partner. 

Benefits

Chances are your company already has an established compensation package built for your channel partners.  In order to recruit newer, more profitable partners, it may be necessary to entice them with additional benefits.  Offering marketing development funds is a great way to persuade potential partners without sacrificing your profit margins.  You’ll need to carefully weigh the revenue potential of each partner in order to determine the type and amount of added benefits you should offer them.

Research

Channel recruitment, at its core, is essentially a sales process.  You will want to thoroughly research your potential partners in order to determine if they fit your criteria.  Many channel managers develop partnerships without thoroughly researching their partners.  You will want to dive deep into the aspects of their company such as historical reputation, sales prowess and marketing capabilities.  With the time it takes to manage and develop these partnerships, performing the necessary research to ensure the partnership will be a good fit is essential.

Recruiting

After you’ve identified and gathered information on your target partners, it’s time start actively recruiting them.  Teleprospecting plays a key role in the recruitment of prospects for your channel.  Although a lot of information can be found through your initial online research, more specific questions that are company centric are necessary to determine quality partners.  Reaching decision makers within a target company can be difficult and time consuming.  This is a task better suited for a marketing team so that recruiting will only be dealing with warm leads.  Well developed qualifying questions and appointment setting will ensure your recruitment team is speaking with truly qualified prospects.

Nurturing

Developing a strategic partnership can involve a long sales cycle.  You will find that many companies, although interested and qualified, may not be ready to partner with you right away.  Implementing a lead nurturing process based on teleprospecting as well as email work flows will ensure your company stays in the forefront of your targets thoughts.    Phone calls to determine where they are in the sales funnel and email workflows that continue to educate them on the value of your company will keep their interest until they are ready to discuss a partnership.

Implementing

One of the best ways to incorporate a new channel partner is with a pilot program.  Once you’ve identified and established a partnership, you’ll want to see how they perform.  Rather than immediately committing to a long term partnership, setting up a pilot program to gauge the true impact of a partnership will save you time and money.  You can research and get to know a company thoroughly, but it is impossible to know how they will perform until they begin to promote and sell your products.

Outsourcing

Researching and recruiting channel partners takes tremendous effort and many companies lack the manpower to successfully onboard partners without causing interruption to their current business.  Hiring an experienced team to handle the entire process based on your guidelines can provide you with a higher success rate for your biggest targets as well as uncover additional partners that fit your needs.

Founded in 1990, Winn Technology Group is a leading provider of global, multi-channel marketing solutions for the technology industry.   For both direct and channel sales, Winn supports demand creation, account-based marketing, channel management, digital marketing, social media, teleprospecting, lead nurturing, event marketing, database services, and inbound response management.