How to Ensure Your Channel Program Operates at Peak Efficiency

It's a tricky time to be selling in the tech world, and vendors and resellers are both facing daunting limitations. That's why it's more important than ever that tech companies and the partners that sell on their behalf focus on ways they can grow together and help each other do more, potentially with less.

IT teams are shrinking, with 21% of companies (registration required) reporting a reduction in headcount, and budgets are getting slashed to match economic conditions and constraints. In 2024 and beyond, executives must prioritize investments in their business units that bring more resources to resellers and partners to help them operate more efficiently.

Operational Efficiency the Goal

Based on discussions with our network, operational efficiency is the No. 1 priority for channel partners, whose reselling contributes a significant portion of LogicMonitor's total revenue. To make your partners' lives easier, here's how you can help them simplify processes and remove friction.

The plus for your organization? Having this information at the ready internally allows your team to determine who the highest-performing partners are on your roster and provide white-glove service accordingly.

Think big about the kinds of materials your partner can use: there are obvious, co-branded kinds of collateral such as graphics for social media, copy for social posts, etc. But think about everywhere your partner shows up: online (banner ads, videos, email signatures), educational material (white papers, one-pagers, research), and via their marketing strategy (SEO direction, email marketing templates, thought leadership, etc.). The opportunity here is limitless, and partners are endlessly appreciative.

I've seen this work shockingly well firsthand. My team once collaborated with a reseller on a webinar to cross-promote both our hybrid observability software and the partner's expertise in implementing transformative IT solutions. From that effort alone, we generated more than 100 quality new leads. This ticked a lot of boxes for us: new leads, expanded brand awareness and education for current customers on our scope of services.

I saw this play out in real-time recently, and my team's timely communication saved the day for us and our partner. A reseller of ours was working with a major health care company, and toward the end of a long sales cycle, the deal started to fall apart due to budget issues. Our partner's only course of action was to leverage the potential customer's current marketplace, which our partner didn't have access to — but LogicMonitor did. We quickly acted to get them set up in this marketplace so they could save the deal. The moral of the story? Be available and quick to act when it comes to client communication and reap the benefits.

Bonus: automate a lot of what partners need from you; it goes a long way toward making everyone's job easier.

Eliminate Roadblocks

In short, it's on vendors to make relationships with channel partners as easy and profitable as possible. From my perspective, it's the easiest path to success for both parties.