Here’s the reality: No matter how successful your channel program is, there’s always room to grow. You want to keep pushing to ensure that your channel is fully motivated, empowered, and equipped to sell your solutions, and remains an enthusiastic and committed partner. By focusing on continuous improvement, you can increase profitability, build loyalty, and stay ahead of your competition.
What is a Channel Strategy?
To go back to the 101 lesson for a moment: A channel strategy is, simply, your roadmap for distributing products to customers through third-party partners. It outlines how you empower value-added resellers, systems integrators, and other partners to sell your solutions. What that means in turn is that if you’ve got a good channel strategy, you also have an effective pathway to generate sales beyond your internal teams, reaching more customers and driving greater success.
Perhaps paradoxically, however, your channel strategy should focus on more than just closing deals. Your partners need more than that in order to truly be your representatives outside of your own net. Think about what you can do for them at every stage of the sales process—from onboarding and training to deal registration and ongoing communication.
And remember, a successful channel strategy isn’t static; it evolves based on feedback and changing market dynamics. The days when technology and business models didn’t evolve at the speed of light are long gone.
Incentives Are the Foundation of Channel Success
Next, consider this: Would you work for free? Of course not, and neither will your partners. While they’ll profit from the sale of your products, the margin in the channel is infamously thin, and so, offering meaningful incentives is the cornerstone of a thriving channel program. Without them, it’s difficult to get partners to prioritise your solutions.
When we talk about incentives, we’re referring to tangible rewards, often financial. However, other benefits—such as exclusive events, recognition, or travel incentives—can also be powerful motivators. The key is to ensure your incentives drive the right behaviours at every stage of the partnership.
You should also create multiple points where partners can accumulate incentives:
Training and Certification: Don’t just assume that partners will be invested in keeping their skills up to date. Understand that training and certification is actually a substantial expense for them to wear, so provide them with incentives back in return.
Deal Registration: This is a simple one, but reward partners for registering opportunities and progressing through sales stages. You want them to actually use your deal reg systems, so reach for the honey rather than the stick.
Campaign Participation: Incentivise partners to participate in your marketing efforts and use PRM platform to measure performance.
Loyalty and Retention: Finally, reward the partners that epitomise loyalty and commitment. Show appreciation to long-term partners with exclusive benefits – look at how a company like American Express rewards its very top-tier customers, and see if you can give your entire channel something similar to aspire to.
If you really nail these four things down in a way that turns the partner’s head and steps beyond what they’re used to with their other vendor partners, you can expect trust, motivation, and greater sales in return.
Boost Your Channel Strategy with These Key Tips
Going further, building a successful channel program requires more than just incentives. Empathy and proactive support are also essential. The more you understand your partners’ challenges, the better you can help them succeed.
With that in mind, here are three actionable tips to enhance your channel strategy:
Implement an Effective Deal Registration Program
You have to get deal registration right, because it is foundational to managing partner relationships and protecting deals. Get it right, and partners feel confident that their efforts won’t be undermined by competitors or your internal teams. Get it wrong and you’re looking at conflict and deeply distrustful partners.
You can sidestep potential pain by establishing clear rules for deal registration, ensuring fairness, and maintaining transparency. Partners should know they can trust your process—which encourages them to bring more deals to your table.
Invest in Partner-Friendly Tools
No one wants to work with a company that makes their job harder. By investing in tools that simplify processes, you make it easier for partners to collaborate with you.
For example, Vartopia’s EZ Update feature allows partners to update deal progress from any connected device without logging into a portal. These tools reduce administrative friction and encourage timely, accurate reporting.
Provide Comprehensive Resources for Partner Success
The more up to date you can keep your library of resources for partners, the more they’re going to leverage it and the better returns you’ll get from it. The simple lesson here is to make sure that you keep working on it.
What does that mean? Use the partner portal as a true content distribution system, providing guides, product information, and marketing collateral. Establish a regular calendar of webinars, and make the content available on demand for those that can’t attend live. Most importantly, actively engage with your partners to understand their needs and address challenges in real time.
A successful channel strategy is a partnership. By investing in your partners’ success, you drive your own success.
Ready to Transform Your Channel Strategy?
Whether you’re launching a new program or refining an existing one, Vartopia can help you bring simplicity, speed, and profitability to your channel. Our technology solutions streamline deal registration, incentive tracking, and partner engagement to help you achieve better results.
Request a demo today to see how Vartopia can take your channel program to the next level.
