When sales organizations look back on 2020, one of their main “lessons learned” might be the importance of Customer Success. With so much uncertainty impacting the economy, sales teams are eager for effective ways to reconnect with their customers and bring new ones into the fold. This year and well into the future, Customer Success will be a key differentiator between losing sales and enabling significant growth. 

If you are selling enterprise technology, you are probably selling cloud services. The cloud drives most technology decisions since hosted services are being used to handle data, business applications, development, and virtually anything that supports enterprise-driven businesses. You should include cloud services as part of your channel partner program.

One of the fastest ways to expand enterprise sales is by enlisting help from channel partners, but to be effective, you also need a partner relationship management strategy. To make your channel partners effective, you have to provide the tools and support they need for success.

Any company looking to increase revenue should consider a channel partner program. Naturally, you look to your in-house sales team first to help build revenue, but it can cover only part of the market. A well-established partner channel can help you capture untapped revenue. By collaborating with the right channel partners, you can access new revenue sources and new customers that you may never have known existed.

When you have a channel partner program, you need to rely on your channel partners to manage not only customer sales but also the overall customer experience. In the age of software as a service and recurring revenue models, everyone in the value chain has to assume responsibility for customer success. However, your channel partners are on the front line, since they closed the sale and are the first line of defense for customer fulfillment. Therefore, the vendor’s job is to enable channel partner success in order to optimize the customer’s experience.

If you are in sales, your focus is on closing the next deal. However, the post-sales process is just as important as getting the order. You spend time and energy bringing in new customers, and you want to make sure they stay happy, content, and loyal.

The poet John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island.” Donne was talking about the human condition, but he could have been talking about sales and marketing. No organization can successfully deliver goods and services in isolation; every business requires strategic partners with whom it works as a team to close new sales and handle customer fulfillment. That’s why “the channel” was created and why effective channel management has to be a strategic aspect of any successful organization.

Guest Blogger David O'Brien, with Partner Perspectives shares insight gained from living in the partner world (while operating a reseller business). He understands, firsthand, what works and what doesn't work with vendors and the relationship investment made to succeed with channel partners. MarketStar and Partner Perspectives have joined forces to create a Channel Readiness program that provides Channel assessment, planning, implementation, and framework guidance to position vendor channel partners for maximum performance.

Our global teams mirror the organization and support of their U.S. counterparts, but with localized day-to-day management based on in-country culture and laws. Sales as a Service on a global level means a single management platform, a single point of contact, and worldwide consistency in your global center of excellence.

MarketStar sales centers in EMEA are located in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. Our EMEA employees drive client sales through inbound and outbound chats, lead qualification, partner enablement, and partner account management. This post is written by our Dublin thought leader: Anthony E. Byrne.

When the best partners have countless companies vying for their attention, how do you stand out from the rest and build a mutually beneficial relationship? The answer lies in well-executed partner marketing programs and tactics, which happen at the intersection of sales enablement, to-partner marketing, and through-partner marketing.