No matter how good a product is, a company cannot realise its potential without a good sales channel.
By Alexander Moiseev, chief business officer at Kaspersky
For businesses like ours, which operate on a two-tier sales model, this means that they have to invest a lot of effort in developing this channel and building relationships with partners.
Investing in the channel partnership through continuous improvements and the introduction of new solutions is critical to yielding strong channel satisfaction.
Here are the key steps beneficial in supporting this:
Collect feedback and improve programme usability
Decisions about how to make an existing partner programme better should not be taken in a conference room based only on hypotheses. First-hand feedback from partners is the best option to address specific pain points and needs. This makes doing business easier and helps partners focus more on sales, and less on paperwork. Feedback forms are therefore a must, to evaluate training programmes, the partner portal, sales tools and marketing campaigns.
Through feedback, significant improvements to a partner programme can be managed. For example, for us, this resulted in simplifying and automating the deal registration process by up to several clicks, reducing the rebate period by up to two weeks, updated training, and adding specific products to the portfolio.
Increasing agility of marketing planning and expand asset packs
Introducing a more flexible planning of marketing activities in the partner portal is important, for the planning of joint campaigns according to their own cycle, and not that of the vendor. This is especially helpful in light of the pandemic when many marketing events have had to be reworked to new formats. As part of this, automating the campaign planning process and making it available on the dedicated partner portal, means there is no need to waste time on additional vendor communications.
It is also important to consider that partners may not always have enough resources to prepare marketing assets themselves. Supporting this process by providing partners with readymade marketing campaigns with a full set of materials – from brochures and whitepapers to emails, scripts, and battle cards, can improve this step. All they then need to do is add their logo. We found that such a change actually resulted in the growth of partner marketing activities by 1.5 times in 2020.
Provide partners with tools and skills for customer acquisition in a new climate
There is no doubt that the pandemic has changed customer interactions and the sales process. It is important to help partners reorganise their sales in this new climate, to attain quality leads. This often requires support in training.
For example, in addition to standard sales training on our partner portal, we have introduced two new training options: for remote sales and for soft-skills development.
Within the remote sales training, partners were provided with accounts for LinkedIn Sales Navigator – the tool that allows them to reach a specific target audience, companies, and business roles across LinkedIn. The training also gives partner sales managers recommendations and best practices on how to use it so they could reach the right roles and personalities with relevant messages. For example, for a financial decision-maker, they can find out about reducing financial risks. For IT specialties, they may want to learn about increasing the fault tolerance of their systems.
Invent new technology solutions
Not all remote sales challenges can be solved with the help of training and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. For example, sales of industrial solutions often require the physical presence of the cybersecurity experts in the production facility to assess the state of cybersecurity and to offer relevant protection.
To solve this challenge, a vendor can develop an appliance that allows remote auditing of operation technology (OT) networks. This small and easy-to-install appliance can be sent to a customer via a courier service. The telemetry data collected by the appliance is sent to the vendor and allows its experts to audit the state of OT security and vulnerabilities remotely, to provide each customer with specific security recommendations. This is an innovation solution we took and found to be successful as the appliance can also be used as a proof of concept of how the product works in real life.
Revise the approach to partner education
The reviewing of content of courses and training offered by vendors for partners, and focusing on the feedback they provide, is essential, as it allows for any required changes to be implemented.
Training for sales (a guide for customer profiling, competitors, etc.) and for technical support (a deep dive into the product for technical support engineers), will also remain important. However, in test mode, how about considering adding a third specialisation – training for pre-sales with less technical details, but still sufficient for proof of concept (POC) and to answer questions about product integration.
Focusing on three specialisations should enable partner managers to focus more on skills and knowledge that are most relevant for their roles.
The past year has shown that circumstances can change overnight. Regardless of the situation, businesses should be flexible and always ready to experiment; to always try to find new, better ways to operate. This is more than relevant for partner relations too. The reward for bold strategy is the satisfaction of partners, customers, and, of course, profits.