If you want to get your product out there and in the hands of your target audience, then you need to focus on your distribution channel. This is easier said than done, and sometimes you might find yourself torn between reseller partners and distributors. With SaaS expected to achieve over 17.7% growth in the future, it’s now more important than ever for you to start exploring your options.
When companies focus on key performance indicators or KPIs, they think about revenue most of the time. While measuring your revenue is absolutely crucial, you have to know that it does not paint the whole picture of what is going on. Selling through channel partners isn’t as simple as managing your own internal sales team and you probably won’t have a clear picture of the pipeline your partners are managing. For this reason, you have to make sure that you are relying on internal metrics as much as possible.
When you explore a channel sales model, you will see that the company sells through a third partner. These are known as affiliate partners, who gain commission on every purchase that is made. You also have resellers and value-added partners. Value-added partners are providers who will bundle your product with their own. Either way, with channel sales, you are relying on a third party to sell your product or your service. This can include resellers, distributors, or anyone who doesn’t directly work for your own organisation.
There is a universal challenge when it comes to both scaling and generating partner revenue. Strategic partnerships can easily help you to source and accelerate sales. On top of this, it can also help you to attract customers that will lock in and reduce your overall churn rate. The problem is that scaling a partner program can be somewhat difficult. It requires you to have a very strong foundation of trust, access, data, and security. Companies that are trying to build and scale their revenue-generating relationships tend to face two different challenges. This includes sharing data before they have built trust with a partner and having a sales team that can’t co-sell without the right data.
A lot of people wonder if they actually need PRM or CRM. After all, time is always moving too fast and at times it may seem that there is always a new software tool that is constantly vying for attention. You also have the partnership ecosystem which is exploding right now, and all of it is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down
A partner will help a vendor to extend the presence that they have. A vendor can then hire another direct rep and then build a team. The vendor will be outsourcing sales to others in this instance. One direct rep can easily cover a huge amount of territory, but a partner rep can cover multiple partners, each of who have their own salespeople and therefore can cover a much bigger area.