Many suppliers assume that the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto principle) applies to their reseller relationships: 80% of their revenue come from 20% of their channel partners. SiriusDecisions research seems to bear this out: most channel partners work with six or seven suppliers, but actively sell for only one or two.

An understandable desire to nurture the most profitable relationships, combined with limited time and resources, often results in tiered partnerships. Top performers receive support, resources and access to exclusive promotions and SPIFs, while the majority of other suppliers get…a login to the partner portal, an occasional email update from their channel manager, and a pat on the back.

But what if this tiered treatment turns the Pareto proportions into a self-fulfilling prophecy? What if the breakdown isn’t nearly that simplistic? And what if you could capture more sales from the vast majority who aren’t actively selling for you? Imagine what even modest gains—say, a 5% increase—could do.

And that’s not even taking into account that some percentage in that underperforming 80% are the proverbial low-hanging fruit: they get your product and would like to sell more of it, but haven’t been given the resources or know-how.

The fundamentals you need to address if you want to truly engage the Lost Tribe of Channel Partners: you need to increase awareness of your products, and you need to increase access to training and marketing collateral so your partners can get what they need, when they need it. And this goes way beyond the partner portal, because let’s be honest here, partner portal engagement statistics are grim.

Sales Support in the Workflow: Beating the 80/20 Rule

Many suppliers still conduct the bulk of their training and sales kickoffs with big, splashy events. These events still have value as a means of connecting with partners and generating buzz, but as a means of driving long-term knowledge retention and behavior change, it’s pretty terrible. The salespeople will have forgotten most of the information within a month, and all the excitement and momentum from the kickoff will have faded, too—allowing old patterns to reassert themselves.

Situating your training, support and sales collateral directly within the sales reps’ daily workflow gives the short bursts of reinforcement they need in order to engage prospects more effectively. What does this look like?

• It looks like delivering your content on mobile devices so field reps have ready access to information on the go.
• It looks like short bursts of information that give sellers the specific bit of reinforcement they need to have better selling conversations, instead of dense PDFs, Word docs and PPTs that run 20, 30, 50 pages long.
• It looks like relevant content that’s intelligently served up based on transaction data—instead of making your resellers dig through page after page of search results in your content portal.
• It looks like a tool that lets your resellers share your product information and demo videos on their turf, with just a couple clicks, either in person or through email.

In short, to boost channel partner sales effectiveness, you want to reduce content access barriers, and you want a solution that’s easy—perhaps even delightful!—to use, to help drive usage instead of setting up another digital graveyard. A sales enablement tool that integrates with your partners’ workflow, instead of actively pulling them out of it, will go a long way towards capturing the attention and mindshare of that underperforming 80%.

Click here to read about how wheel end manufacturer KIC achieved a record year of sales after providing real-time support and content to their partners with MobilePaks.