Partner Portal: Answer to Channel Management Challenges

Managing channels can be a daunting task in today’s more global economy. Software manufacturers are especially marketing their products via channels because their customers and end-users are from all over the world and not just in their localities or even their countries. To keep up with the changing technology, channel management must find ways to evolve and improve their strategies. One of these tools is a partner portal.

Challenges to Independent Sales Vendors:
•    Small volume of sales from resellers
•    Lack of customer-vendor communication
•    Lack of communication and control over international resellers
•    Non contributing resellers to marketing cause
•    Too much competitiveness between resellers of the same vendor

Challenges to Resellers:
•    Increasing demands to different software solutions
•    Vendor’s products are mismatched to customer’s needs
•    Market saturation from vendors recruiting too many resellers
•    Tedious sales reports
•    Competition with vendor’s online store and associates

The solutions of these challenges from the perspectives of both the vendors and resellers are:

Better communication – Improving the communication between the vendor and reseller increases the chance of success in both parties. If the vendor knows the problems facing resellers, they can immediately come up with solutions to solve the issues. The vendor would also benefit from better communication with the end user or customer as well as to improve the products with every version they launch.

Focus on best resellers – It’s important for the vendor’s interest to acknowledge and encourage outstanding performance by resellers at the top of their game. Awarding incentives to top resellers would greatly boost their morale resulting to increased motivation to sell.

Increase in marketing tools – Although it’s the vendor’s job to market the product, it is important to still provide resellers with marketing materials to help them sell the product to their respective consumer targets. If necessary, vendors in vertical markets, for example, need to train resellers to at least familiarize the representative to their product so they understand and appreciate what they are selling.

Expansion – Vendor’s need to recruit new resellers to improve their sales but it does not mean they need to saturate one area for example. Before recruiting resellers, the vendors need to research for example, the geographical area for any existing resellers. Too much competition between resellers can cause riffs in the channel partnership.

Partner Portals are usually SaaS or Software as a Service type of web application. The data and software itself are provided by third party solution providers that the vendor hires to consolidate all the channels into one specialized application. The application can be accessed anywhere so channel partners from around the globe can log in as long as they have internet connection.

The portal contains forms, graphs, maps, etc. to help resellers with their tedious paperwork, lead generation and so on. The application simplifies the channel management process and eliminates unnecessary steps to getting a comprehensive over view of the channel partner relationship. The streamlined process means that salespeople have more time to sell because they are freed from generating reports, invoices, etc.