The full version of this article was first published at: The Beginner's Guide to Structuring Your Channel Sales and Success Teams
One of the most obvious reasons businesses start building a channel program – whether with traditional VARs, referral partners, affiliates, and technology partners – is to extend their sales and marketing footprint into markets and geographies that they otherwise couldn’t cost-effectively reach. One of the most obvious hiccups these same business often experience early in the process, however, is in building the structure and then hiring the team to recruit the right partners and ensure they are successful. At best, they simply have inadequate coverage. At worst, they see their partners migrate to competitors who are just as eager to grow through indirect sales, and possibly more prepared. We see it time and again: the seductive instinct of one business leader after another to believe that the most logical person to start growing their channel program is, of course, their most successful direct sales representative. And time and again, we see this strategy not only fail, but actually damage the business in its entirety by: 1) putting one of its most productive team members in a complex and unfamiliar position where they aren’t set up for success; and 2) removing one of the company’s top revenue-producing assets from its sales organization. Plain and simple, just because a sales rep or other team member is a top performer on the direct side of your business doesn’t mean that they’ll excel building your partner program. If this were a football analogy, that would be like taking your best running back and putting…
Read More: The Beginner's Guide to Structuring Your Channel Sales and Success Teams