Global Expansion for B2B Startups: How to Create and Manage a Thriving Channel Partner Network
Your business is looking to expand your reach and drive growth, your industry uses channel distribution as part of their business model, but where do you start in building an effective Channel Partner Network?
Understanding the Importance of Channel Partners
Channel partners such as Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) act as an extension of your sales and marketing team, helping you reach customers in territories and markets where it can be challenging to engage due to language, geographical and cultural differences. Your business can leverage their local expertise, existing customer relationships, and ability to navigate local regulatory and cultural landscapes, you can accelerate growth.
So what are the main considerations in building a great Channel Partner Program?
1. Channel Recruitment: Finding the Right Partners
Recruiting the right type of company and channel partner is the first and most important step in building a successful program. Your ideal partners should align with your company's values, have a strong and proven track record in your target markets, and have the resources to promote your solutions effectively.
Key Recruitment Steps:
Market Review: Start by identifying key territories where you want to build a local presence and map out which competitors also play in these markets along with challenges and important information such as regulatory requirements, customer behaviour patterns, and industry maturity.
Partner Profiling: Consider what attributes your partners should have including who they sell to, how they sell, their customers base and in-house expertise and experience in the industry. In some cases, you might decide to exclude companies that sell your direct competitors’ products so there isn’t a conflict of interest.
Marketing to Recruit: Build out and execute targeted marketing campaigns, attending and exhibiting at industry events to create awareness and a buzz for your brand, and using you and your team’s personal networks to connect with potential partners.
Selection Process: It’s important that you focus your efforts on getting the right partners to work with and the process to select the right partners should include reviewing their track record, financial stability, and customer references. Ensure they have the resources to scale effectively.
2. Partner Enablement: Empowering Partners for Success
Once you’ve found, recruited and signed your partners, the next step is to arm them with the knowledge and tools they need to effectively sell and support your solutions. This is not only ensures that your partners can confidently represent your brand and deliver value to customers, but shows them your commitment to supporting them on your shared growth journey.
Enablement Tactics:
New Partner Programs: Create a structured onboarding process including a series of training sessions, product guides and process documents, and a clear roadmap to becoming a certified partner.
Technical Support: Provide dedicated technical resources to help and support partners with implementation and troubleshooting.
Sales and Marketing Training: Offer sales enablement tools, including pitch decks, demo environments, and objection-handling guides. Partner Marketing support is key to your partner’s success in selling your products, not only does this include spending money in your partners region to help with awareness but also providing tools such as official images and co-branded marketing materials.
Communication: It’s essential to keep your partners up to date on your product updates, new features, and industry trends using a variety of methods including webinars, email newsletters, partner portals and where possible site visits.
3. Incentives and Rewards: Motivating Your Partners to Sell
Partners have many vendor options and will expect reasons to engage in a relationship with your brand that is mutually beneficial. It’s essential to create an incentive scheme that creates commitment and rewards progress and success in promoting and selling your products.
Incentive Strategies:
Margins: Like most businesses, partners are in the business to not only provide their customers with great products but to also make money. Setting attractive margin offers for goods sold creates a great incentive for businesses signing up to your partner program.
Tiered Partner Levels: Having a tiered system not only provides a progression of benefits for partners but also a motivation to to achieve more sales. Tiered systems are very typical and if your business grows and gains market traction, partners will see their progression to higher tiers as a unique selling point to their customers.
Deal Registration: If your partners share which prospects they are engaged with, it can help avoid channel (and sometimes direct sales) conflicts and also give you the opportunity to offer exclusive discounts or bonuses for partners who register deals early.
Recognition Programs: The partner community work very hard to represent their vendors and creating a program to recognise the top-performing partners through awards, exclusive events, or enhanced support, not only motivates them but also strengthens their commitment to your brand.
4. Marketing Support: Amplifying Partner Efforts
although you marketing team might be small, providing your partners with marketing support is crucial to helping them generate leads and close deals. Where possible, this support should be customised to the needs of your partners and their specific markets, ensuring that your brand and messaging are consistent across all channels.
Marketing Support Techniques:
Co-Branding: Creating co-branded marketing materials such as emails and content allows partners to present your products as part of their broader products and services. This helps partners seamlessly integrate your solution into their existing portfolio.
Joint Events: Working with your partners on delivering webinars, trade shows, or virtual events to generate leads and build brand awareness can help your partners achieve their piepline goals and help your business generate more revenue.
Localised Campaigns: One of the benefits of working with partners, is their local expertise particularly language and cultural information, as such your partners can create and launch customised, localised campaigns to attract local customers to your brand.
5. Managing Global Challenges: Language, Timezones, and Cultural Differences
As your channel partner program expands globally, you’ll need to manage languages, time zones, and cultural differences complexities.
Global Management Tips:
Translated Content: Translate all key documents into the languages spoken by your partners and their customers including contracts, implementation or user guides. Work with local experts or your partners to ensure that translations are culturally appropriate and will likely resonate with your target audience.
Global Support: Set up your support processes to manage different time zones to provide timely assistance to all of your partners to ensure they receive the help they need, regardless of their location.
Cultural Training: It can be challenging to learn how to do business in different countries or regions without prior experience, you may need to offer cultural sensitivity training for your internal teams improve communication and collaboration and prevent misunderstandings and strengthen relationships.
Flexible Scheduling: Be mindful of time zone differences when organising meetings, training sessions, and other activities, ensuring they are accessible to partners in various regions to improve attendance and engagement.
Building a successful channel partner program should be planned by your Go-To-Market team and requires a deep understanding of your target markets, and a commitment to supporting your partners at every step.
By recruiting the right partners, enabling them with the tools and knowledge they need, incentivising their success, supporting their marketing efforts, and managing the complexities of a global operation, your B2B startup can leverage the power of effective channel distribution to achieve exponential growth.
Need help building out your channel partner program? Let’s chat!
