Must have Channel Sales Strategies for success in 2022

Depending upon which vertical or market you were in, and what infrastructure you might have already put in place ultimately dictated whether 2021 was a year where your organization thrived or struggled. Companies with a sound infrastructure in place came out on top. In retrospect, this is the time of the year where organizations look back and analyze the gaps in their channel sales strategies and channel marketing processes. What worked well, what slipped through the cracks? Deploying a partner portal to support your partners and streamline communication is tables takes in today’s business-to-business world, allowing you to achieve your channel sales goals much more effectively. Here are a couple of Channel Sales Strategies you can use to drive further success in 2022:

1) Defining your goals and objectives

The success of any leading B2B organization is a well-formed partner ecosystem. Before formalizing the partner ecosystem, it is important to align and optimize the value to the customer. The following aspects can help the organization to align the goal towards increasing the Channel Sales. A well-formed partner ecosystem for some companies, in some markets, can be the cornerstone of success. Before heavily investing in a partner ecosystem, it is important to align and optimize value through your partners, to the end customer. Here are a couple of quick tips to help drive alignment between yourself as the vendor, and your partner to drive channel sales strategies:

• Make sure both sides of the partnership clearly understand and can articulate the desired growth rate.
• Set SMART goals that result in net-new customers and market growth within a target geographic region. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timeline-based.
• Pay attention to the data, we have been hearing about data for years not. 2022 is the time to use it.

These are all very doable action items and should be relatively easy to achieve. Don’t forget to communicate to your channel sales team so that they don’t forget what they agree to via partner facing dashboards, and regular updates via your partner relationship management system.

2) Elevate your partner's experience as a KPI

If you talk to product managers, product designers, and UI experts it is generally understood that the experience a user has within an application has a direct correlation to their desire to keep coming back to use it. It is unfortunate that this is less well known and adopted as a driving mindset within partner programs today. Take for example a proposed KPI of partner seller time spent per deal registration submission. What are you doing to drive that time spent lower, helping your end seller increase their efficiency? Here are a couple of other ideas you might think about implementing as potential KPIs related to partner experience:

• Partner support requests or ticket submissions
• Time spent on specific content pieces
• Daily active partners
• Social shares through partners

The easier it is to do business with your organization, the easier it will be for you to not only communicate your desires to your partners but also help them understand why you have chosen to track those metrics.

3) Understand the needs of your partners

One of the biggest mistakes we saw being made over the past 2 years here at Vartopia is when vendors would make assumptions about how their partners had transitioned their business in the wake of COVID. When we would ask, “have you asked your partners what they are doing differently, and how can you support that initiative?” We usually got blank stares and awkward silences. If you are not asking your partners what they need help with, what challenges they are facing, or what concerns they have in doing business with you then you are missing an amazing opportunity to move the needle in a positive direction with your channel sales organization. Request a demo today to explore Vartopia’s platform, and learn how we can help you move the channel revenue needle in 2022!