Lead Generation Strategies for Channel Partners and Resellers

A channel partner is a company that sells products and services for a technology manufacturer or vendor. This technology may include hardware, traditional software, Software as a Service (SaaS), or cloud computing solutions.

The channel partner is part of the vendor’s indirect sales force, meaning that they sell the products and services on behalf of the vendor but they are an independent company. They may also sell products and services produced by other vendors as well as items they develop themselves.

Many large businesses choose to rely on channel partners that will sell and distribute products, doing the online marketing process is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. There are countless channel partners across multiple locations, the challenge is all about making sure that these partners have the leads they need to help grow the business.

Landing Page Templates

Most of the time, your landing pages are going to be your make or break when it comes to redirecting your leads to it. The best approach here is to create a landing page that allows every reseller to put it on their main webpage in order to capture lead data as well as provide an offer. Most website visitors come to your websites without the intention of buying because they’re most likely still in their early buying stages. However, they come to your website to lurk and see if you’re offering something that they’re looking for. So, instead of having them simply visit your site, present them with an offer in exchange for their information even if it’s as small as their email address. By doing this, you will be able to stay in touch with them via the information they have provided or let your leads and sales team do the follow-up.

Longtail Keywords

Another make-or-break aspect in any business is keywords. This means that keywords should be used consistently across your webpages in terms of title, URL, page headers, and text. Identify the keywords that are in the longtail of your services and/or products and give them to your partners to use. The reason should actively practice this is because when you’re doing extensive background research in order to provide a solid starting point for your channel partners, they will be able to optimize their pages.

Email Template and Campaign

An oldie but definitely a goodie campaign strategy is email. Contrary to popular belief, email is still an integral part of every lead generation. Together with your team, come up with a solid email marketing campaign consisting of offers that each of your partners can send to fresh leads. Doing such a campaign is to help move your leads forward into the next step in their buying process and increase your partner’s lead-to-customer percentage.

Co-invest with your Channel Partner

You can also encourage co-investing between your organization and the channel partner. Remember, a channel partner would always like to have more salespeople, but they cost money. So your company could actually co-sponsor or co-invest with dedicated sales reps. This makes it very attractive to the partner—and you have reps who are very interested in your own product.

If your company co-invests, you can say, “We will pay for 50 or 75 percent of the sales rep, but here’s the criteria. They have to go to our rep training school or make X number of new calls per day to new customers. Or we will reward the rep three times the amount of commission to a new customer versus an old customer.” There are many different ways that your company can incentivize the representatives with co-investing, and it can be incredible leverage to create new sales and build a true working relationship.

Work with a Lead Generation Agency

Lastly and most importantly, we highly encourage you to partner up with a lead generation agency to take this tedious task of finding and qualifying leads out of your hands. Once you find the right lead generation agency that matches all your needs, they will handle the distribution of these appropriately qualified leads to your channel partners. Working with a lead generation agency also saves you a lot of time that you can now focus on other more important aspects of your business instead of scrambling to gather every detail to give to your channel partners.