Teaching Your Way to Greater Channel Partner Mindshare

Teaching Your Way to Greater Channel Partner Mindshare:

While many companies are looking to third-party distribution channels to grow their market reach in 2012, lack of partner mindshare could be a road block to fully taking advantage of this growth opportunity.

We know that selecting the best-fit partners is paramount in starting an indirect selling relationship off on the right foot. But even with the right partners, companies often fail to achieve long term success…because they focus only on their needs rather than those of the channel partner and end-customer.

One area where this is especially evident is the creation of new sales messaging, collateral, and support tools for partners.

While most of us have shifted our sales message and support tools for direct reps to focus on customer needs instead of product features and benefits, many have not taken the final step to fully incorporate this new messaging into partner support resources.

If we’re providing our partners with only product-focused collateral, we’re leading them into missed opportunities, lower margins, and as a result, lower mindshare.

So, why is the sales support and tool creation process breaking down as your sales message moves closer to the end-customer?

More often than not, it’s because we’re not listening to our partners’ feedback or focusing on the type of support the partner really needs to be successful in selling our products and solutions.

To aid channel partners in creating better sales support, Zebra Technologies provided their high-potential channel partners with sales support tools specific to each of their customer segments.

First, Zebra created internal collateral consisting of easy-to-understand pamphlets on each targeted customer segment they sell to. Each of these pamphlets were developed to educate the sales person on the key things they should know when interacting with a customer in a given segment – such as probing questions to ask the customer and typical concerns coming from key customer stakeholders.

With this, channel partner rep s can have much smarter discussions with end-customers because Zebra has given them a pretty good idea of what customers’ needs are.

The second thing Zebra did was create an online tool that channel partner reps could use to customize collateral to an end-customer’s industry and unrecognized needs. So instead of a blanket, one-size-fits-all message from Zebra, the tool allowed the channel partner to develop a resonant message for their end-customers.

Finally, as Zebra was designing these tools for their channel partners, they made sure to gather and incorporate partner feedback to ensure Zebra was addressing their partners’ selling challenges. Not only did this improve the effectiveness of the tools, but it made their partners WANT to use them – which really helped partner reps adopt to using the tools in the long-term.

Supporting their channel partners with tools and messages specific to each customer segment drove improved performance and mindshare of Zebra’s channel partners. In fact, not only did nearly 60% of their partners report higher margins, but at least one channel distributer affirmed their new way of approaching their channel strategy “caused me to drop the lines that compete with Zebra.”

So if we’re aiming for increased partner mindshare, it certainly doesn’t get much better than that.

SEC Members: Read the full study on Zebra Technologies’ Vertical Solutions Customization Toolkit and learn more about involving partners in the design of support resources to increase partner sales.

What other strategies have you used to increase channel partner mindshare? What kinds of tools and support do you provide to your best-fit channel partners?