If your company sells through resellers or a channel, then your process might look something like this:
- You work hard to bring in high quality leads
- Your qualification team checks on the leads and sends the best ones on to your resellers
- A large black hole engulfs the rest of the data in the sales cycle
There are many advantages to selling through channel partners, but one of the biggest downsides for a marketer is the lack of visibility. In order to know which marketing programs to continue, which trade shows to attend, which AdWords to buy, etc. you need to know which leads are resulting in closed deals. Many people have tried to solve this problem (and they’re still trying!), so I’m not going to tackle that black hole.
What I can tackle is a quick check-up on your partners so that you can measure who’s following-through with the leads that you’re sending to them. Here’s how it works:
Approximately a week after your inside team has qualified a lead and sent it to a partner, send a follow-up email to the lead asking them a simple question: “Did our partner get you the information that you needed?” Make it simple for them to respond by offering two links in the email: “Yes, I have what I need” or “No, I’m still waiting on information.”
Ideally, you’re going to want to use a marketing automation system to do this so that you can take it one step farther: a week after sending that email you can check to see who did not respond in any way and send them a second/final email asking again. Now you have three groups of leads: those who haven’t replied, those who are happy, and those who haven’t heard from their assigned partner.
It’s that final group that you’ll want to keep an eye on. It’s time to give them a little attention again from your inside team, then assign them to another partner and get the ball rolling. If you start to see trends in this group – are the same partners failing again and again? – you’ll need to dole out warnings and perhaps even take away partner privileges… I’ll leave that up to you and your organization. On the other side of that coin, keep tabs on the happy group too and consider rewarding (or at least thanking) the high-performing partners.
I’d love to hear from you – have you tried anything like this? What kind of results have you experienced?
Posted in: Data Management, Sales and Marketing Alignment
This is a great post. I have people ask me about managing the channel all the time. I will let you know if I see any results from this solution.
I think this is a great idea to get started with managing channel follow-up, in a very simple but effective way. Depending on how tightly you can integrate with the channel partner, the next step would be to offer them use of your CRM/Marketing Automation system so you see the actions taken by the partner, and you don’t have to ask the lead (the lead doesn’t really benefit from a vendor checking up on its partners).
Jep – I agree on the idea of letting the partner have access to the CRM (perhaps via a partner module) and that will help close the loop. In the case that inspired my post, my customer does have that in place but they needed a way to light a fire under the partners. Now that the partners know that someone can “tattle” on them, they’ve stepped up their activities a bit in some cases (several partners were already high performing). In addition, I do think there’s a small touchy-feely benefit for the lead in that they see that their interest has been taken seriously and the company is invested in making sure they have what they need.
This is a great post that can be overlooked quite a bit. Being visible to your potential clients is an absolute necessity for marketers to remember when using channels. I would also add that using a channel that is reputable and trustworthy will ease any worries that you may have with this issue.