As you know every sales team has a certain capacity. This capacity is defined by:
- the number of opportunities they can generate;
- the number of calls they can handle;
- the conversions they get from these calls;
- a whole lot of factors to make your sales team more efficient.
You have to work on all of those factors while increasing the constant size of your sales team along with your sales budget. It makes your software service more expensive as well as makes you less competitive and naturally limits your growth.
How to Establish Your Channel Sales?
So, how do most successful companies handle that? In most cases when companies reach a certain size or a certain brand recognition, they focus on their channel sales for their partners to do all the work for them. They define a certain commission they are ready to pay for a successful sale and factor that into their pricing. There are some steps you need to go through to establish your channel sales, take them off the ground, and make them the main channel of revenue generation for your team. Whenever you decide to establish channel sales for your business, the first thing you need to do is actually create your partner program. It becomes necessary to define three things:
- Commission.
Firstly, the commission you are ready to pay to a partner for a successful sale. This commission can be one time split over multiple months or a lifetime. However, the best way to define it is to look up your competitors, figure out what they offer, and offer something better.
- Actions.
Secondly, the actions you want your partners to perform. Your channel sales program might have multiple tiers as some of your partners might be able to make the sale while others will only be able to generate the opportunity. If you are interested in both, I suggest defining different years of partnerships with different levels of commission.
- Applying to be a partner.
The third thing is a procedure for both applying to be our partner and passing over the deal or the opportunity to your sales team.
Ideal Partner Profile
As soon as you finish creating your channel sales programs, the next step for you is to define your ideal partner profile. This profile can vary from business to business, but generally, you’re interested in businesses or individuals who already have some kind of business relationship with your potential clients. For example, if you are selling a call center platform the best type of partners for you would be anybody who works with call centers including MSPs, staffing agencies, etc. At the same time, if you are selling a CRM platform, you would want to connect with sales consultants. So, your goal is to narrow down your ideal partner profile including their geography, the size of the company, the type of service you provide, etc.
The best thing you can do is to find your potential partners and reach out to them, have a discovery call, and move the conversation forward with ones that have some potential. The most straightforward way to do that is to assign a full-time person to be in charge of the process, but you can also do it yourself. If you want to generate revenues through channel sales fast, your best interest is to get as many partners as possible and as fast as possible. That might be tough if you are just starting.
Takeaways
Therefore, there is a need to establish your channel sales, take them off the ground, and make them the main channel of revenue generation for your team. It might make sense for you to hire a professional at Sales Nash. We can set up a cost-efficient SDR team for your business so that you will be able to reach out to thousands of potential partners every month while keeping your expenses low feel free. You can use the form below for our team to provide you with a sample of your potential partners and a plan on how we can get them on a call with you.
Whenever you get to the point where you are able to generate meetings with your potential partners, it is just a numbers game. You have to generate anywhere around 10 calls to have anywhere around two to three partners. While only one in three partners will generate a sustainable amount of revenue for your business. You will get one or two valuable partners after about one month of work. And in a couple of months, you will be able to make channel sales the main revenue generation channel for your business.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section!