Recruiting new channel partners is essential to maintaining and growing a profitable channel partner community. Using teleprospecting and email is vital to the success of these campaigns. Here are six steps to help you set up and run a successful channel partner recruitment campaign.

Identify Your Ideal Partner

When determining your ideal partner, you’ll want to consider several factors, including location, company size, sales and marketing capacity, experience in your industry, and current partner relationships. Each partner you recruit should check all of the boxes outlined in your partner criteria.

Build Your Marketing Database

Once you’ve identified what your ideal partner will look like, you’ll want to begin compiling a contact database. You want to narrow your universe to target your messaging to your desired audience whenever possible. Gather 2-3 contacts from each company, and remember that the correct contact will often come from a referral.

Do Your Research

Before placing a call, your team will want to do some preliminary research on each company and the contacts they’re reaching out to. This helps to warm the call a bit and can provide talking points. It will also give you insight into the organizational structure and help determine the proper contact.

Build Out Your Talk Tracks And Knowledge Base

You want your talk tracks to be attention-grabbing and informative while gathering the information you need to qualify a potential partner. A brief greeting that identifies your company and purpose and asks whether or not you have the correct contact and a list of qualifying questions should be followed by an attempt to set a formal appointment. Make sure you have a clear and concise voicemail ready for the many times you will not reach the contact live. Your voicemail should include your company name and communicate the purpose of your call. Lastly, you should include a knowledge base for your callers to reference. You should include answers to frequently asked questions and details about the potential partnership within this document. This way, your callers won’t be caught off-guard and will be able to provide enough information to set an appointment.

Create Your Marketing Emails 

You will want to make sure you create a high-level marketing email piece, a more detailed information piece, and a more generic, I left you a voicemail-type email piece. Before launching your calling campaign, you’ll want to send an email blast to your entire target universe using the high-level marketing piece to help to shake out potentially interested prospects. Anyone who clicks on this email should be made a priority when the calling phase of your campaign begins. During the calling portion of your campaign, you should send the generic email piece after every voicemail you leave, so you create a one-two punch. The last email piece that includes more detailed information should be used after your team has had a conversation with an interested prospect that is not yet ready to commit to a scheduled call.

Continue To Nurture 

When the calling phase of your campaign is over, you are likely to have unresolved records still. For those that have shown some kind of interest, you should place them into an email workflow. This will continue to nurture your prospects with additional information and ensure your campaign doesn’t leave any leads on the table.

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