Graduation season has come and gone and summer is in full swing, no better time to release my story about my experience building Find it EZ’s Reseller Channel, or Partner Program as we like to call it. For those who are unfamiliar with who I am, my name is Riley Bell and I’m the new Channel Manager of Find it EZ. This post will be the first of many coming from myself as I look to engage in more meaningful conversation with my partners and with our end-users going forward.
Included in this post will be:
- Defining what a Reseller Channel is.
- Building Find it EZ’s Partner Program
- What I learned from this experience, so far!
Defining What a Reseller Channel Is
When I was first tasked with defining a reseller channel I quickly learned that there are many different interpretations of what a reseller channel is. As part of a University of British Columbia 4th year student project team, from our research it became clear to us that the industry standard definition for a reseller channel was a business strategy that vendors ( including software publishers or hardware equipment manufacturers ) develop to encourage others to work with the vendor and sell its products or services. The image below should provide everyone not familiar with the IT world what a typical reseller channel looks like.
It is a is a business strategy that vendors use to encourage value-added resellers (VARs), consultants, systems integrators (SIs), and technology based distributors to recommend or sell the vendor’s products and associated services.
Most major information technology (IT) vendors have built successful partner programs, including industry giants like Apple, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and the list goes on. However, numerous smaller vendors also develop and rely on such programs, because channel partners give them more “feet on the ground” and a direct link to pre-qualified end-users that already have a trust relationship and procurement process in place with specific resellers. Typical features of partner programs include product and sales training, access to vendor technical support, lead generation and access to beta versions of vendor products. Other program incentives can include awards and industry recognition at vendor events and rewards to channel partner sales staff.
Building Find it EZ’s Partner Program
When deciding what would be best for Find it EZ’s channel program, we chose to focus in on our strengths and target market niche. Find it EZ’s key software product line strength and value is that it makes it easier, faster, and more accurate to manage Enterprise software change that involves and may affect a cross section of multiple programming languages source code, business intelligence reports and/or databases. Our ideal customers are database and business intelligence report developers. One of our main challenges was that as a high tech start-up “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream market, we lacked the resources and global awareness to reach a global audience. It’s easy to admit that although we have a great tool, only a tiny fraction of our large target market truly knows about the value of Find it EZ. We realized this fairly early on and have developed a strategy that includes targeting the right kind of resellers and spending a considerable amount of effort communicating the value of our products to them so that they may “spread the word” more rapidly and cost effectively then we could possibly accomplish through any other marketing effort on our own.
We needed to communicate the value of Find it EZ in such a way that distributors and resellers could immediately understand how our products would benefit their customer’s whom they already had developed a trust relationship with. We also needed to demonstrate the value and quality of our partner program to demonstrate how we would be easy to do business with and worth the effort to engage in a mutually beneficial partnership. To do this, we developed a go-to-market channel strategy that focused on engaging with resellers who are already aware and have experience in the database and BI software market. We do not want to bite of more than we can chew, and seeing how a successful reseller channel normally takes a few years to fully develop, we want to focus on our niche and grow our sales reach through this channel.
To begin the development of our channel, we designed and published various marketing materials and vastly improved our online reseller portal within our website. Our core values at Find it EZ are professional quality with superior customer service, so ensuring our customer’s and partner’s first experience with our company was exceptional was of significant importance to us. To date, we have developed well over a dozen marketing aids that we provide access to within our reseller kit.
All these documents are great and aid in my daily work, but a key fact I want to communicate to prospective reseller channel builders is that these documents will all be useless unless they’re distributed effectively. The timing of when to release these documents is important because you never want to overload a reseller early on. These resellers are all busy people, and if your product is truly worth looking into, they’ll come around when they are ready. In fact, most of the time your partners will ask you for relevant documents to aid in their reselling. A key strategy my CEO has passed along to me is the 3/3/3 strategy. It entails following up after 3 days, then 3 weeks, and if timing was not right on first contact, try reaching out again in 3 months. Practicing patience is key in the IT industry, and pushing sales too hard can put off a lot of business professionals and have a negative rather than the desired positive effect. Besides, the ideal resellers you should be targeting should never need to be reminded over three times. If you ever run into these types of prospective contacts, it is likely a sign that particular reseller isn’t a good fit for your company.
What I Have Learned from this Experience, so far!
It has been just over a month since I began executing the second stage of our reseller channel, recruitment. Already I have learned a lot, most importantly is that it takes times to see results from your efforts. Building our reseller channel was something that took time, it’s not something that can be developed over a weekend. It took several groups of university students over three semesters just to conduct the required market research, present us with ideas, then an additional month to come up with all the marketing materials necessary to add value to those ideas.
However, what we do have now is something that took time for me to fully comprehend. What we now have is a sales process in place. We have eyes on the bigger picture and it is backed with research and forecasts. Throughout this post I’ve stressed how building a reseller channel takes time and requires patience, all of which are true…but another important aspect I want to introduce now is the ability to keep your eyes on the prize. It’s why we’re all in business, isn’t it? … to create innovative products and services that add real value, then market and drive sales! But for that to take place, you need to have a solid strategy and process in place so that whenever you find a need to pivot and adapt, you have the benefit of counting on a solid foundation and “road-map” to guide you.
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