If you want to grow your data center's client list and revenue, you’ve likely at least considered building a channel partner program and recruiting like-minded VARs and MSPs.
This is a very appealing proposition for many CEOs as you’ll likely reach highly fragmented market segments that wouldn’t be cost-effective to reach on your own. And you’ll gain an army of evangelists and sales staff without increasing your organization's headcount.
How Should You Go About Channel Management When Growing a Data Center?
Many people don’t realize that if you’re trying to attract a certain kind of reseller, or you’re trying to attract a certain kind of service provider, it’s another buyer persona. (Or perhaps, more than one additional buyer persona)
We’ve had several conversations like this with clients and prospective clients during the past few months.
Because when it comes to VARs, you’re not looking to attract all 160,000 SMB VARs in the U.S.
Or the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft partners in its ecosystem.
That would be too broad of a net for most data centers to cast.
Buyer Persona for Data Center Channel Partners
So, you need to be specific about the channel partners you want to attract.
- What are they worried about?
- What are their goals and challenges?
- What are they searching for online?
- Where do they hang out online and offline?
- What are the things that can get them a promotion?
- What are the things that can get them fired?
- What are the things that can get them new clients?
- What are the things that can get them kicked out of new clients?
Worry More About Their Problems Than Yours
Once you understand all those issues, you must create hyper-relevant content that helps those VARs, your potential channel partners, address their problems.
This includes content in the form of blog posts, screencasts, videos, podcasts, eBooks, white papers, and checklists.
This content is all about you teaching how to be a better VAR and how to be a better channel partner.
Early on, these VARs are not looking for your channel program. They’re just looking for advice on how to solve a specific problem in their VAR, reseller, or MSP organization.
If you can be perceived as a teacher, a trusted advisor, a subject matter expert, or a thought leader, it builds up that trust. And that’s an extremely important prerequisite for getting them excited about joining your data center’s channel partner program.
That Delight phase is extremely critical at the end of the Inbound methodology because getting them signed on as partners is only half the battle.
You need to ensure you have the right enablement strategies to teach them – you’re basically teaching them how to sell through.
It’s not about selling your channel partners. It’s about teaching your channel partners what your sales team can do on a more independent channel partner basis.
How did you launch your data center’s channel partner program? What was the biggest lesson you learned from recruiting your first 50 partners? Let us know in the Comments.
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