Channel partnerships are a critical driver of business growth and competitive advantage. Here are a few industry statistics to paint a picture of the impact these partnerships can have on your business:

• Deals close 46% faster when a partner is involved.
• Deals are 53% more likely to close when a partner is involved.
• Deals with partners have a 40% higher average order value.

These statistics underscore the significant role that channel partnerships play in accelerating sales cycles, improving conversion rates, and driving overall business growth.

95% of Microsoft’s revenue flows through its partners, demonstrating the incredible potential of a well-executed channel strategy.

Now, if you’re reading this and thinking, we already understand this and run 100% of our business through channel partners.

Keep reading, because that brings us to our next point.

Achieving Optimal Channel Partner Performance

Even large companies face significant challenges in optimizing these relationships. Here are 5 common obstacles I’ve observed across the tech industry:

Winning mindshare:

Nothing happens without first forging a partnership. When partners are juggling multiple vendors, being considered, standing out and maintaining focus on your products becomes increasingly difficult.

That’s why we started providing channel marketing for our clients. We found that marketing departments often have a lot on their plate, and channel marketing is relegated to partner portals, webinars and newsletters.

We find that most vendors don’t really approach their partners as customers – however, by applying a strategy of relevant campaigns to drive interest, and highlight your unique selling proposition you’ll significantly grow your engagement.

Effective communication:

Keeping partners informed and engaged with the latest updates, features, and resources often falls short, leading to missed opportunities.

We sat down and looked at how most vendors approach their partners, and engage with them. We found that while partners are interested in relevant information to help them win business, salespeople rarely have time to “self educate”. So, hour long webinars and high-level newsletters were non-starters.

This is why we created our bite sized “why” videos for channel partners.

Maintaining brand integrity:

Ensuring partners accurately represent your brand and provide consistent customer experiences is often a concern, and can be challenging without proper training.

This dovetailed with our efforts to deliver video segments to help address knowledge gaps without overwhelming a partner. In essence, we created a drip campaign that eliminated “fluff” material and simply focused on delivering consistent knowledge over a longer period of time.

Scaling partner management:

As networks grow, efficiently onboarding, supporting, and managing an expanding roster of partners becomes increasingly complex.

We saw this as a major challenge to be solved and created our inside sales services to help vendors scale their support of their channel partners. With our experience and understanding of the industry, we were able to provide a service that provides contracted inside salespeople who are fully managed, dedicated and located in Idaho to help reduce the cost of scaling support and mitigating common risks when hiring in-house.

Demonstrating value and ROI:

Partners need clear evidence of the benefits of promoting your solutions, especially in a competitive landscape with economic pressures.

Addressing these challenges requires taking an approach that’s going to be different than that of your competitors. It means rethinking how you use training programs, communication channels, and tracking partner performance.

Assuming you have a good product, with features that deserve a channel partner’s time and investment promoting them, you’ll need to think about how to stand out from competitors also vying for their business.

By investing in channel sales and channel marketing, companies can transform their channel partnerships into a scalable, efficient growth engine that drives significant competitive advantage in today’s B2B marketplace.

What is Wave Representatives?

I know we have a lot of new subscribers, so besides running the GTM Pipeline newsletter, that’s focused on sharing GTM strategies based on our experiences running our agency Wave Representatives.

We also offer comprehensive solutions to address channel partner support and help our clients build a thriving network of engaged and successful partners.

Read this article to see if outsourcing is a fit for your company – why outsource?

Channel Sales: Leveraging Inside Sales Outsourcing

Getting faster sales support is important to your partners. When speaking with channel partners, quick response time on product questions is always at the top.

Regional Sales Managers simply aren’t always available so, having dedicated inside salespeople that can increase your responsiveness is essential if you want to build stronger partnerships.

Wave Representatives offers contracted, dedicated, fully managed inside sales for companies that don’t have the time, or budget to hire, onboard and manage full-time inside salespeople internally.

• Regular communication with partners
• Provision of bite-sized training content
• Quick response time on product questions
• You pay a flat monthly rate, zero commissions

Our contracted inside sales service allows your company to build relationships directly, maintaining your accounts and contact data in your CRM for improved channel partnerships.

Channel Marketing: Leveraging Video Production Services

Creating and distributing educational content that keeps your channel partners engaged can seem impossible.

Unlike traditional webinars, producing videos that are long enough to educate your partners but short enough to keep their engagement isn’t easy.

There’s a lot that goes into creating videos, from a good script, lots of equipment and the knowledge on how to use them, but videos are well worth the investment, since they help your partners to internalize your various advantages and then convey those points to end customers.

Since most companies don’t have the resources to produce effective videos internally, Wave Representatives started helping our clients produce their own branded channel education videos, giving them the content they need to keep their partners engaged and motivated.

Wave Representatives understands the tech-industry and channel partnerships, offering high-quality video production services:

• Short, engaging videos that educate partners on specific product features
• Well-produced series highlighting your product within various use cases
• 2-minute product explainers per month, including custom motion graphics, voiceover, subtitles, and fully licensed music
• Our video production services start at $9,900 per month, providing you with the content needed to keep your partners engaged and motivated.

Software Acquisition and Deployment

We implement software solutions designed to streamline vendor support for partners, enhancing data sharing and visibility into partner activity.

By partnering with Wave Representatives, vendors can:

• Strengthen communication and collaboration with partners
• Provide effective education and training to partners
• Increase partner engagement and satisfaction
• Gain valuable data and insights into partner performance
• Accelerate deal closure and improve conversion rates
• Achieve business goals through improved channel partner alignment

So, whether you decide to leverage all in-house resources or augment your efforts with Wave Representatives, optimizing your channel partnerships can be the difference between leading the market and falling behind.

By prioritizing your channel partnerships, you’re not just improving individual deal metrics – you’re creating a scalable, efficient growth engine for your business.

Contact us to learn how we can help you build stronger, more profitable channel partnerships and fully capitalize on the benefits of a well-executed channel strategy.

Thanks for reading.