Winning Sales Channel Strategy

A channel sales methodology allows your company to leverage the help of third-party partnerships to sell your company’s products and services. Channel sales methodology is widely used and is usually deployed as part of your company’s business growth effort. Channel can help your company to grow in three important ways:

To reach new consumers and clients who do not purchase in a direct way from the vendor, preferring instead to purchase from consultants or resellers.

To sell the goods through third-party partnerships or marketplaces and to managed service providers, which can offer package deals to end-consumers and clients and appeal to purchasers looking for different and various goods and service options and sales deals.

Channel sales strategy can help your company in finding new business in new geographic regions.

What is the meaning of the term channel sales (definition)?

A channel sales strategy involves using partners and third parties—such as affiliate partners, referral partners, wholesalers, managed service providers, distributors, marketplaces or value-added resellers—to sell the products or services of the company. This method is quite in contrast to a traditional, and direct sales strategy in which your company’s sales department is solely responsible for selling goods to consumers.

What different types of channel models are there?

The good news is that there is no such one-size-fits-all approach to channel sales strategy so your company has plenty of options to explore. Here are some of the options open for your company (few may look more or less charming depending on your business):

Referral partners
Influencers
Managed service providers
Distributors
Retailers
Marketplaces
Value-added resellers
Agents
Dealers

Companies both big and small may find third-party partnership through individual people and enterprise companies alike. SalesBabu’s own partner program is a great example of this.

What are the advantages of channel sales strategy?

1. Enter into new markets and expand the product globally

A local third-party partner in a new geographical region knows the targeted geographical market better than your company do, already has a large audience in your company’s preferred space and understands the business culture.

Taking benefit of this is the key when attempting to broaden and widen your brand reach and acquire new sales leads, prospects and ultimately large number of clients and customers.

2. Boost up your business (even if your internal resources are limited)

Allowing third-party referral partners to attract sales leads and get your goods in front of them can be considered a fast way to acquire new consumers and clients and boost up your business profit margin.

However, other channel sales third-party programs may not always faster to set up than direct sales strategy. For example, value-added resellers may take six or seven months to a year to onboard fully, and most sales channel third-party partners will need frequent training as your product develops.

3. Introduce your goods to different customers

Whether it is going globally or getting your goods in front of a specific geographic region, partners can help your company in any circumstance. Retail firms commonly rely on sales channel strategy to expand their brands.

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4. Boost your firm’s reputation and name recognition

There are also third-party equivalents, such as Amazon Web Services and Samsung AppStack, which are the marketplaces that mainly sell software and apps from channel partners. These digital channel partners make benefit in a number of ways:

Their goods have a wider audience.
They can save on online administration fees and costs.
Their own company’s websites get backlinks from well-known firms.

5. Save a good amount of money on shipping, distributing, and web hosting

Dealing with shipping and distribution is often tedious and consumes lots of time of your company, not to mention very costly.

Through certain intermediaries and channels, your company can offload these costs on your company’s partners that already have the existing infrastructure, supply chain, good and an established presence in your target geographical market.

What are the challenges of channel sales?

Although sales channel strategy has the potential and the capacity to transform an up-and-coming product of the company, but there are still a few potential challenges to consider.

1. Revenue sharing means having fewer profit margins

Through sales channel strategy, different thor-party channel partners obviously take a good cut from your sales profits. Whether it may be around 10% or 25%, or 50% (and sometimes even more), losing out on profit margins that would otherwise be all yours from direct sales to customers can sting your company.

That said, your company is likely to save more money in the long-run way when it comes to ongoing client support and account management. After all, 75% of something is always better than 100% of nothing.

Read More – Manage your Sales Team Smartly

2. Less control over your firm as a whole

For a startup company, you can train the sales department of your company, but you can not completely control what your indirect sales or third-party partner force says or does when they interact with target clients across various touchpoints.

While your company should obviously try to work with people whom you can trust, having your firm’s reputation tied to a third party may be stressful. If third -party partner can slip up or make a mistake, then your company may have to deal with the consequences by proxy.

3. Reduced time spent directly with consumers or clients

From feedback to goods recommendations and beyond, your company’s existing clients are a treasure trove of insights. Less face-time with your clients and end-users means less time your company is taking in understanding their unique and customize needs, challenges,desires ,and pain points —especially as third-party channel sales partners are even unwilling to allow a vendor’s salesmen to contact their clients directly.

4. Numerous Organization and Priorities

Channel Sales partners have their own set of priorities to be fulfilled. Difficulty here is that such a set of priorities do not go well with the priorities of the organization which diversifies over a period of time. Such a situation may arise even when the organization is making an effort to promote a specific product or trying to get into a specific market or convincing the channel partner to follow a particular sales process, the channel partner may not be willing to process the pertinent activities. Scenarios like this become pivotal for the organization to accept what partners’ priorities are rather than indiscriminately delaying tasks and making use of the resources to deliver the desired business results.

Channel Sales Advantage

Effortless Scaling

Potential for scaling becomes unlimited when you cannot optimize upto a certain level. Scaling a business is of utmost challenges owners go through. Hence, there is a limit to how much you can optimize a present lead generation approach, and penetrating through a new market includes a lot of planning and resources. A channel sales can help you avoid many of the obstacles that come with scaling your business process, shifting the bulk portion of the job onto third-party partners who will help in generating sales prospects for you. Considering that you can find the correct partners, you can gain instant entry to complete markets you were uncertain of reaching before which can increase growth and make sure that the flow of new business doesn’t get exhausted.