One of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they deploy a third party channels however, is to think that the companies that they sign up are going to do the work on their own without any support from you. One of the things that we've seen over and over again as companies spend a huge amount of resource and effort to go start, create, deploy third party system integrated value added reseller networks but they don't provide any resources, any management, any support to them after they come on board.
If your company is thinking about deploying those kinds of third party distribution channels, one of the hidden costs associated with that which you want to make sure that you factor in, in addition to discounts and commissions that you're going to pay, is the amount of sales support, distribution, product support, technical support that you're going to need to proactively supply to those resellers in order to make sure that they're optimized in their sales performance for you.
A lot of companies think that if they can sign up a network of system integrators and resellers they'll go sell on their own. But the fact is, when the distribution channel of the ones that provide active support in the form of lead generation, in the form of sales support, and in the form of technical support training for their reseller, they gain active share from their resellers, so their resellers are thinking about promoting their products verses their competition. All sorts of incentives, rewards and recognition programs are available to be put in place just as you would put in place for your direct fields sales team if you were to have a direct sales force.
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