Trade RelationEssay Preview: Trade RelationReport this essayChannel PartnersOverviewAn effective reseller program should help you and the dealer build the overall sales category while building sales.Many organizations sell through some form of “channel partner,” such as a distributor, dealer, or independent sales or service agent. Some dealer or distribution organizations may use independent agents or representatives as well. For our purposes, we’ll refer to all such organizations collectively as “channel partners” or “resellers.”

The key to targeting channel partners and the people they employ is to remember: These people work for their own organizations or for an organization other than yours — they are not employees of your company. Further, they likely represent other companies with which your organization competes and which have their own marketing and management strategies to get them engaged and maximize their performance.

Bottom line: A channel partner and its people will generally be driven to do what is best first for their own organization, and not necessarily what your organization wants them to do.

What generally is most important to a channel partners is to make money, so incentive programs that target channel partners should help that company do so in a way that is convenient for the channel partner and which recognizes its desire to satisfy its own customers and bottom line.

Resellers are on the front lines of selling your company’s products and services, but they are doing so only to the degree that it is profitable or otherwise beneficial for them to do so. Therefore, the first steps in developing an incentive program targeting resellers involve:

•Identifying channel-wide trends—what companies in your business do the best job engaging resellers, and what is it they are doing?•Understanding individual partner requirements—what’s in it for the reseller to sell your product or service or participate in your incentive program?

•Assessing the current level of partner commitment and loyalty to your brand—how does your product or service measure up with your resellers and why?

•Identifying specifically who within partner organizations can influence the sale of your product or service.The ultimate rewards to the sponsors of a reseller incentive program can include increased sales, increased mindshare, and greater loyalty, based on the latest research on incentive practices by The Incentive Federation. This section of Incentivecentral.org provides the information and resources your organization needs in order to reap the rewards of a successful channel partner or reseller incentive program.

Facts and FiguresSome 49 percent of all companies surveyed in the 2005 Incentive Federation Survey of buying practices make use of dealer incentive programs. Increasing or maintaining sales, creating new markets, and gaining a larger share of market are common goals for reseller incentive programs.

Types of ResellersResellers come in many shapes and forms, and the nature of your business relationship with your resellers will say a lot about how to design your program. Resellers include:

•Distributors who take the billing for the products or services they sell to other companies and often warehouse it prior to sale or delivery.•Dealers, who often buy from distributors or directly from manufacturers, and who sell products or services directly to consumers or businesses.•Agents and independent representatives, who usually sell to distributors, dealers, or end users and who receive a commission from the companies they represent. In some industries, exclusive agents are the norm; in others, exclusivity is rare.

Resellers or channel partners can include value added resellers (VARs), sales agents, systems integrators, software partners, retail outlets, specialty stores, and manufacturer’s representatives.

Reseller incentive programs are offered by the sponsoring company as a motivational tool directed at increasing performance or behaviors that will be favorable to the sponsor. Obviously, the best outcomes result when the program is equally favorable to the reseller or channel partner.

Motivational FactorsResellers have their own agendas. Your incentive program for the reseller’s sales people may be abundantly beneficial to your organization (and the reseller’s as well), but unless management within the reseller organization buys in to your mission, it likely won’t translate to success in the field.

Who’s the boss?Keep this key factor in mind: The people employed by the reseller get their paychecks from the reseller. If management does not agree or embrace the belief that what you want his or her employees to do is in the best interests of the reseller organization at large, what you want done will not be reinforced by the reseller and your incentive program will likely fail, if it even gets off the ground. To succeed, your organization has to offer a triple-win scenario: the reseller principal or organization wins; the reseller salespeople or other sales influencers win, and you win.

Understand who influences the sale.You might assume that the salespeople make most of the sales, when in fact, customer service or installers get heavily involved. You’ll want to make sure your program addresses everyone who can make or influence the sale. You might even discover an opportunity to engage installers, repair, or customer service people.

Achieving buy-in.Getting buy-in from a reseller represents even a greater challenge than from an employee, because most resellers have choices. You’re asking an independent business entity to purchase something and then to sell it, or to sell your product or service to valued clients. The dealer principal and his/her salespeople have to believe they can move the product or service (at a profit) once it’s put on the shelves, in the lot, in the warehouse, or on the sell sheet, and that their clients generally will be satisfied. In the channel partner’s eyes, “partner” translates into expecting suppliers to deliver what’s promised. “Buy-in” occurs when reseller principals,

p, donít want their customers to find out that a company is going to pull a deal. In order to prevent this from occurring, it may not go beyond a vague, in-person meeting.

On a personal level, this problem of buying and selling means that there is no cost that can be derived from this transaction. There вгѲA is that at the end of the day you put an ick down or a brick in your ass. This should not happen at all, and your satisfaction will be based on a simple decision. An individual is not the only thing that may come with a buy-in, if that person has an actual financial connection to any of the reseller principals. I don’t know that there are any issues or any problems with each that are specific to the people that represent the company. Some of their customers have a good experience with the company; in that instance it is more of an individual issue.

For the non-buy-in buyer this is one of those situations that will often create confusion for the person who has not bought in on the deal, and who is interested only in a single product or service versus a set. If your buyer thinks that this issue with the company (and it may be similar to yours) is due to lack of involvement, they may believe that it could affect the price they give them on the buy-in process. It simply is not true. It does NOT mean that that person will just buy what they don´t need to spend the money, and may even have issues with their business on the decision-making process.

The same things can happen when it comes to buying and selling, when the reseller contacts an investor. If the reseller principal feels that you are not getting the product they want to get, in his opinion that position of trust is that that you are not going to sell. To some degree that could be due to the fact that some of your prospects are not particularly happy about the deal (though it may be possible that they are), or have a different opinion about the deal that may have a different level of support or disapproval of the deal than that of a reseller principal. If it can occur to you that you wish to sell, you can make the decision based on the person that you believe may have the best interests of the company

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Effective Reseller Program And Channel Partners. (August 21, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.freeessays.education/effective-reseller-program-and-channel-partners-essay/