Become the market leader

Wayland agreed and said that resellers with the right model will help assess their existing, or prospective, sales channel and determine which partners are really performing, and which partners are simply diluting the marketing effort.

“Our objective is to help organisations select the right partners, develop meaningful programs, and achieve great results. This is done through helping the vendor engage more effectively with the channel as well as improving the channel’s ability to sell the vendor’s products,” he said.

“This will help identify best-of-breed channel program models, and design and/or manage a vendor’s channel program.”

Wayland said an effective channel program or strategy requires sales and marketing people to be equipped with the right skills to consistently execute on that strategy.

This can be achieved through the use of channel surveys to identify strengths and weaknesses in a vendor’s go-to-market strategy. It can also uncover competitive positioning, and ascertain channel expectations and pain points.

He also explained that partner selection is crucial to achieving maximum coverage with minimum conflict.

“Most organisations will spend a significant amount of time selecting and recruiting sales staff, but adopt an ad-hoc approach to selecting and recruiting sales partners,” he said.

“We believe that you need to take just as much care in selecting your external sales partners as you do on your internal sales staff. Not only can partners affect sales; they also impact your brand and reputation.”

Finding the right partner type with the skills and the motivation to sell your product more effectively is very important to ensure consistency of partner selection and recruitment.

“The outcome will be less time and money wasted on recruiting partners that promise a lot but deliver little,” Wayland said.

Lowe added that to minimise wasted time and money, resellers must target their marketing activities.

“We attended a major symposium a few weeks ago and attendees were top-of-tree decision-makers but attendance was quite costly – you could be a sponsor and spend major dollars or just attend,” Lowe said. “Either way it is costing money and you must choose the right forums such as a Gartner or IDC forum as a definite way to market.”

She said that knowing the audience and delivering a consistent simple message will help hit the largest target area.

“We target a range of media including magazines and papers in an attempt to get onto the right wavelength of your customers, but these people are not interested in brochures etc, this will send you to the bottom of the list,” Lowe explained.

“You might do better to produce target white papers for IT people, which are not expensive and are targeted to the customer. Case studies are an incredible way of targeting customers,” she said.

However, Lowe and others in the industry say the most indispensable marketing tool in ITC is actually the Internet. She said the medium provides two main categories. A website will draw people in and it pushes information out.

“We have found success in working with vendor sites,” she said. “Appearing on the vendor website allows customers to search the product information as well as directing them to resellers sites.

“They have resellers on site and users can decide to go on as either a customer or as a business.

“We are a Microsoft Gold Partner and appear quite high in its website. A lot of customers go there and we are promoting solutions to the SMB (small-to-medium business) market.”

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