In a recent episode of Digital Conversations with Billy Bateman, guest Jamie McCoy of Consenna Ltd discussed his strategy on working with reselling programs and how to unify them with your product.
What Is a Reselling Program?
Resellers are companies that sell goods and services produced by other firms. They purchase the product with the intent to resell it for a profit, not to use it themselves.
In the Saas market space, resellers essentially become a separate sales team for your company. They work to sell your product for you.
Why Work With a Reselling Program?
Reselling programs are a great business strategy to increase sales and grow your network. It can be very beneficial to work with an established vendor because they already know how to sell and how to do it well.
Resellers can reach a much larger audience a lot quicker than your own sales team can because they already have a large network of connections across various industries. This greatly increases awareness of your brand and product.
The fact of the matter is that you can’t bring in that kind of sales volume with your own single brand.
As Jamie said, “It’s too hard to get that much share of market space.”
Working with reselling programs creates a great space of competition. Your customers can browse and research you and your competitors, all in one spot.
Struggles and Pitfalls of Reselling Programs
Some struggles of working with or establishing reselling programs are that there are pressures on time and lean profit margins.
The major pitfalls are seen when there is a lack of education on the product.
Educate the Team on the Product
Resellers are inclined to want to spend all their time just selling, but it is vital for them to take the time to learn a lot about the product.
How could you sell something when you don’t know its features, uses, or benefits?
Of course, with your own sales team, you want to invest the time and energy to get them to be experts on the product. However, the reality of working with reselling programs is that there is a lot of turnover. So what are the best practices for investing time and resources into training them?
Historically, it hasn’t been done particularly well.
These resellers just want to be selling. They almost view it as wasting time to try to learn more about your product, or your latest incentive, and how all that is going to help them sell more.
Quite frankly, one training session with them is not enough. You should be giving them continuing support.
Pro Tips
For the education of resellers, keep it simple!
All you need to do is let them know about anything new in your product and changes to pricing/offers.
It’s all about support. You should always be trying to lighten the load for them. When it’s easier for them to sell, they are going to want to sell more.
How to Successfully Work With Resellers
How can you successfully harness the full potential of working with resellers?
You should be running all of the automated marketing so the reselling team can focus on selling. You should be delivering them qualified leads who are really interested in buying. That way, the salespeople don’t have to think about anything besides selling.
Communication is also the key!
You need better communication between your company and the resellers in order to know where you’re at in regards to pipeline. Resellers should also be able to give you feedback on how sales are going.
Conclusion
Now let’s recap three best practices:
- Educate the reselling team on your product. They need to know what your product is, what it does, how it alleviates pain points, and who it helps. And teaching them about your product doesn’t need to be something complicated. Keep it simple so they can focus on selling.
- Maintain good communication among your team and the reselling team. When something changes about your product or your pricing, they need to know that. If each team keeps the other informed, then closed deals will sky rocket!
- When you make it really easy for a reselling team to sell, they will want to sell for you. They are salespeople! It’s what they do best! By guiding and empowering your sales teams, you will see a huge increase in closed deals. Jamie explained it like this, “When you multiply that across the channel of 200 resellers, you can double or triple your revenue just by really cleaning up the messaging and making it really simple to just sell your stuff.”
Overall, working with a reselling program can be extremely beneficial to your company. It truly is a great play to add to your marketing and sales strategies.
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