Your ability to build your business and grow sales in new markets is often heavily dependent on your distributors (총판모집) or other indirect sales channel partners (such as VARs, OEMs, manufacturer’s reps, dealers, and licensees).
And to get the sales results you need, it’s critical to find not just partners, but the right partners.
Here’s our top 6 tips to find (and keep) those kind of partners.
Tip #1: Invest in the process. Distributors that perform poorly or aren’t on the same page with your company cost you dearly. Investing in a better and consistent recruitment process upfront will save you time, resources, and headaches later on.
Tip #2: Spend the time necessary to get a clear picture of what makes a great partner for you and your company. Many companies are so eager to get distributors selling that they don’t take the necessary time to articulate all their expectations clearly. Companies may have some explicit criteria, but most have many implicit ones, and their failure to flesh these out and share them with distributors in the exploratory process often leads to disconnects.
Tip #3: Step back and look at your company and products objectively. A company that simply assumes its products are interesting and therefore the best distributors will come flocking to them is bound to have disappointing results. The partner prospects you want are already busy successfully selling other products and solutions to their customers. So you need to demonstrate you’re a more attractive option.
Tip #4: Allocate enough time and effort to really get to know your potential partners before signing them up. Due diligence, business plan agreement, contract negotiation, and establishing clear expectations takes time and sometimes money. You should, however, view these as important final checks that you have the right partner before investing a lot more time and resources with them.
Tip #5: Properly enable your new partners to be successful. This may not sound like a typical part of a good partner recruiting program, but all your hard efforts to sign up the best partners will go to waste if you don’t fully and efficiently enable them. And the best partners will want to know just how you’ll do that as part of the recruitment process.
Tip #6: Regularly re-assess your partner eco-system. In today’s world, things change rapidly. Your company, competitors, your partners, and the market itself are constantly being re-invented. The partners you recruited five years ago may no longer be good fits.
