In a blog post titled 5 Great Tips to Increase Channel Partner Sales, I outline a basic premise: the better your channel partners are at generating and nurturing sales leads, the more you’ll sell through the channel.
That’s why I suggested companies that grow revenues with a partner network spend time and money teaching their partners to become better at marketing and selling.
So what things about lead generation and lead nurturing should you teach your channel partners? In short, teach them to become better at selling and marketing using the internet, social media, and mobile marketing.
We suggest you find ways to teach the following:
- SEO: How to get top organic search engine rankings for search terms that drive sales of your products and/or services.
- Online Advertising: Search engine and social media advertising to generate sales leads.
- Social Media Marketing: Effective ways to generate leads and sales using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media channels.
- Email Marketing: Automated messaging, transactional messaging and newsletters for lead generation, lead nurturing, sales, cross selling, up selling, and customer retention.
- Content Marketing: Ways to create and share media and publishing content in order to attract customers.
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Best practices to convert more website visitors and call center inquiries into leads and sales.
- Website Development: How to develop easy to use websites that generate leads and work well on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
- Marketing Basics: Things like unique value propositions, elements of a good offer, persuasive copywriting, marketing planning, and marketing metrics.
- Sales Skills: Prospecting, qualifying, needs assessments, closing, and customer service using internet tools, social media and smartphones.
- Basic Skills: How to use a search engine, how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, how to gather customer information and competitive intelligence, best practices for email, voice mail, text message and social network behaviors.
Yea, I know. These topics have nothing directly to do with your products or your services. They aren’t “traditional” topics of discussion with your channel partners. They are however the topics that need to be addressed if you want better sales results from your partners.
There are a variety of popular formats you can use to share information and content with your partners. For best results you should use a combination of these formats, and pick the format most suited for the content to be presented. These popular formats include:
- Speeches
- Workshops
- Webinars
- Monthly newsletter
- Online courses
- eBooks
- Videos
- Infographics
- Articles
- Case studies
- Partner online learning center
If you need assistance with structuring a program to improve the marketing and sales skills of your partner network, please contact us for a complimentary discussion.
