Introduction

Reseller partners, when executed effectively, can yield significant benefits for your organization. Launching a successful reseller partnership demands considerable effort but can prove to be quite lucrative. When implemented successfully, it can foster a network effect, with numerous companies and their marketing and sales teams promoting your product to their customer base. This leads to an increase in user count and revenue for your partner program.

Whether you are just embarking on your reseller partner journey or already managing an established partnership, read on to ensure you don’t fall into the pitfalls that have plagued many reseller programs in the past.

In this blog post, we will examine the top ten common challenges that hinder the growth of reseller partnerships and propose solutions to overcome them.

Poor Partner Selection

One of the biggest hurdles that can keep a reseller partnership from hitting its stride is failing to invest enough time in crafting an ideal partner profile and recruiting accordingly. Let’s be honest, not every reseller partner is going to be your perfect match, so taking some time to build out your partner profile before diving into recruitment is absolutely essential.

This is a common misstep of underperforming reseller partner programs; Neglecting this crucial step can lead to recruiting ill-fitting reseller partners and ultimately waste a ton of time and effort with little to show for it.

Lack of Training and Enablement

Another common issue in effective reseller partnerships is not putting enough effort into crafting engaging and effective training and enablement content. When you’re developing training material for your reseller partners and their sales teams, you really need to consider how the content is delivered.

All too often, training content ends up being long, dull, and uniform for every reseller—yawn! For instance, if you’re recruiting reseller partners from other countries, you need to keep this in mind while creating your training content.

The Solution: Relevance is Key!

To steer clear of this issue make sure relevance is the name of the game. Reseller partners often juggle multiple partnerships, meaning their sales teams don’t have a ton of time to learn about new solutions.

 By designing training content that’s concise, relevant, and straight to the point, reseller partners are more likely to retain the information, ultimately leading them to better understand when your product makes sense for their customers. Moreover, relevance should also extend to individual partners. 

As touched upon earlier, if you have partners operating in different territories, language barriers might come into play. In such cases, you’ll need to create bespoke content tailored specifically to their needs. After all, one size doesn’t fit all!

Failing to Establish Clear Rules of Engagement

One of the critical components of a reseller partnership is establishing clear rules of engagement that clearly state how partners are supposed to behave in your partners program. Failure to establish clear guidelines that govern your resell partner program can lead to confusion amongst your resell partners.

Additionally, not setting clear guidelines for things such as deal registration can also lead to things like channel conflict occurring, which will lead to disgruntled partners, and ultimately unhappy partners that are at high risk of churning from your partner program

The Solution: Create clear guidelines

To solve this issue, communication with your partners is a priority. Creating a reseller partner journey map that includes regular touch points, such as cadence calls and quarterly business reviews, can help to establish clear communication channels and ensure that partners feel valued and supported.

Additionally, providing opportunities for training and collaboration with your sales teams can help to build stronger relationships and ensure that partners are well-equipped to effectively sell and market your products.

By prioritizing regular communication and building strong relationships with your reseller partners, you can keep on top of your reseller partners, and make the requisite changes to your program to make them happy and productive.

Failure to Establish Strong Relationships

Strong reseller partnerships are built on strong relationships. To drive your reseller partnerships forward it’s crucial to establish regular check-ins with your partners, prioritizing building and maintaining strong relationships with them. A lack of communication can lead to partners feeling undervalued and neglected, leading them to lose interest in the program and potentially seek out partnerships with competitors who offer more attentive support.

A lack of communication can also prevent you from identifying and addressing issues as they arise. For example, if a partner feels that a deal was unfairly taken by your direct sales team and there is no regular communication in place, this issue can fester and lead to a breakdown in the partnership.

The Solution: Communication is Key

To solve this issue, communication with your partners is a priority.

Creating a reseller partner journey map that includes regular touch points, such as cadence calls and quarterly business reviews, can help to establish clear communication channels and ensure that partners feel valued and supported. Additionally, providing opportunities for training and collaboration with your sales teams can help to build stronger relationships and ensure that partners are well-equipped to effectively sell and market your products.

By prioritizing regular communication and building strong relationships with your reseller partners, you can keep on top of your reseller partners, and make the requisite changes to your program to make them happy and productive.

Failing to Provide Product and Marketing Support

Your reseller partners play a crucial role in selling your products to their customer base. However, they may not be experts in how to effectively position, service, and market your product to a larger audience. One of the most common mistakes made in reseller partner programs is neglecting to provide adequate technical and marketing support to partners. This can result in frustration among partners who may struggle to effectively sell and promote your products without the necessary resources and support.

Limited technical support can quickly lead to unsatisfied customers of the reseller, requiring significant time and resources to support the customer and potentially eating into their overall profit margin. Similarly, not providing marketing collateral can require reseller partners to allocate additional resources to promote your product, causing them to lose interest and potentially seek out partnerships with competitors who offer more comprehensive support.

The Solution: Make it easy

To solve this problem, it’s important to make it easy for your partners to effectively sell and promote your products. This involves building adequate resources and collateral to support both technical and marketing needs.

On the technical side, resources such as troubleshooting guides, invitations to technical forums, and hands-on training with the product can help ensure that reseller partners are up to speed on all key technical aspects of your product. On the marketing side, creating co-brandable assets, case studies, and positioning documents can provide reseller partners with the information they need to more easily understand and sell your solution to customers. 

Although a fairly large lift up front, in order to get these pieces together, they can be reused as you bring on additional resell partners into your program, and can ultimately help them feel more supported and confident in your overall partnership.

To make this whole process easier, consider using a dynamic PRM like Allbound; Instead of delivering a lot of this content manually to the relevant stakeholders at your partners org, store all relevant collateral inside of the Allbound PRM platform. Additionally you also have the ability to co-brand assets from right inside the platform granting partners immediate, round the clock access to the requisite marketing content they need.

In Conclusion

This blog post has covered all the key mistakes that are most commonly made when building a reseller partner program.

 From poor partner selection to lack of training and enablement, unclear rules of engagement, failing to establish strong relationships, and inadequate product and marketing support, we highlighted the most common challenges that can hinder the growth of reseller partner programs. We also touched on the solutions to overcome these obstacles so that you don’t run into these issues and achieve success in your resell partner program.

 If you’re hungry for more partnership content, be sure to check out the Allbound blog, where we regularly share insights and strategies to help you build and manage successful partner programs. And if you prefer to listen, tune in to our Partner Channel podcast for in-depth conversations with industry experts on all things partnership.

 We hope this article has been helpful to you on your journey to building a successful reseller partner program. Don’t hesitate to book a demo if you have any questions or want to learn more about how Allbound can help you take your program to the next level.