Sales Enabling Your Channel and Resellers With Sales Playbooks

How can Sales Playbooks support your channel and reseller sales enablement programs?

What collateral do you currently create for your channel or reseller sales teams? Depending on how long you’ve been operating a channel program, the answer will be either:

• No content at all; we don’t have a channel or reseller portal and we just provide content or marketing collateral when we are asked.
• We have some content for our reseller sales teams to share with customers – it’s the same content that we give directly to customers and is available on our website.
• We give our channel sales teams access to all of the same content that we share with our own sales teams for training and sales enablement.
• We have a dedicated channel portal when resellers can access channel-focused content; showing them how to sell our products and services, explaining why our products and services are a good business opportunity for the reseller, and how to handle different customer scenarios.

We’ve put together a few tips and insights into how to get the most out of your channel sales enablement activities. If you’re looking to create a Sales Playbook for your own sales teams or channel teams, then check out our Reseller Playbook Template Pack.

Creating a channel-focused company

Channels weren’t built overnight. They require time and monetary investment. To get the most out of your channel, it’s important to give them the sales tools they need to:

• Understand your product or service
• Articulate your product’s value to customers
• Be confident to start conversations with customers about your product
• Progress a sale involving your product
• Be excited to sell your product
• Evangelise about your product and company

However, this doesn’t always involve giving your reseller access to the same documentation and training tools that your own sales teams have.

For one, you might want to keep internal company information confidential, especially if it shows information about how to compete with other players in your field, in case the information gets into the wrong hands.

Secondly, you want to tailor your sales training to suit the audience. Here are a few things that wouldn’t be applicable to your own sales teams, but could be important to your channel sales teams:

• Why does selling your product or service make financial sense for your reseller sales rep (i.e. what do they stand to gain commission-wise from selling your product)?
• How can your product help them to increase their share of wallet in their customer accounts?
• How does your product compare to other vendors they are selling?
• How can engaging with your company open them up to new companies they aren’t yet working with?
• How should the reseller rep engage with your company once they uncover a sale?
• How do they register a deal with you (i.e. how do they flag that they are working with a particular customer to prevent another reseller from engaging with that customer, or to prevent duplicate sales efforts from the vendor)?

A two-pronged approach

When speaking to your own sales reps, they are tasked with selling just your products. In a reseller, they probably have a choice of different vendors or products – so you have to sell yourself and your product to them – in a different way to how you would sell your product to a customer.

So, there are two selling activities that have to occur in a Channel Sales Playbook:

• One – Sell the opportunity to the reseller
• Two – Sell the product or service to the customer

We recommend you add in a few sections to the beginning of standard Sales Playbooks to sell the opportunity to your channel sales teams in order to get them excited about selling your product, and to help them understand the value that they can get from selling your product.

If you want some guidance in creating your Sales Playbook, then take a look at our Reseller Sales Playbook Template Pack which is specially created for B2B sales teams. It has everything you need to create your sales playbook quickly and concisely; drawing on our years of experience creating sales playbooks for starts and corporates in the B2B space. Or, if you want a Sales Playbook Template for your own internal sales teams, then our Playbook Template Pack is perfect for that.

Reseller Program Template Pack

$159.00

Shop now