What is channel sales enablement? 5 tips to improve your channel sales

Channel sales success depends upon more significant revenues and broader customer reach. And you can efficiently achieve this by channel sales enablement.

Let’s understand it this way; you might have come across the term “sales enablement.” 

It means providing your sales team with the right content and tools to help them be more innovative and better.

This concept of channel sales enablement is almost similar to the term mentioned above. However, it is slightly different in terms of its sales method.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of the term “channel sales enablement” and its advantages. At the same time, you’ll learn how to build a successful channel sales strategy for your business.

What is channel sales enablement?

Channel sales enablement is the process where you empower your channel partners to sell your products by providing the right product information and resources.

Channel sales involve third parties as a mediator between you and your customers. They aim to sell your products to achieve significant revenues.

Channel sales enablement is beneficial in many ways. Some of them are as follows:

• When strategized and executed effectively, it helps you increase your market share, making it easy for customers to grab your product.
• It strengthens relationships with your channel partners.
• The positive growth rate of brand awareness among markets.
• Constant optimization of both sales and marketing assets. 
• Having constructive channels for the sales enablement process improves customer satisfaction and retention.

These are some of the benefits of having channel sales enablement in place. 

Once you identify that the channel partner enablement program needs improvement, you need to establish a channel partner enablement strategy with your channel sales strategy.

So, the next section explains how you can build one for your business.

How to build a successful channel sales enablement strategy?

A business categorizes its channel partners into two major categories. Some channel partners will be greater in company size and selling power.

However, the rest would be mid-sized or local channel partners, having limited selling power.

Most companies often follow the pattern of allocating or prioritizing large-sized partners as they are successful in reaping greater rewards through the channel partner enablement resources.

And by doing so, these local partners are often underestimated.

However, the small or mid-sized local partners have huge room for acquiring a larger market share.

Hence, making more resources available to these local channels will give you an edge and help you maximize your sales.

In fact, channel enablement strategy is only available in 46% of companies, making it even more important.

1. Focus on partner needs

It is beneficial to think of your salespeople as your first-line customers. As a parent company, you should focus on your channel partner’s needs in the first place.

This will help you discover their expectations of you. Treat your channel partner sales enablement as a product and your partners as customers.

2. Implement software for effective channel sales processes

Effective and timely communication will eliminate half of your work. Remember, communication with your partners is supposed to be clear and concise.

You can implement CRM and execute better sales processes for better coordination with your channel partners.

With advanced CRM features such as contact management, built-in calling, sales, and marketing automation, you can improve your channel marketing and sales process, resulting in increased revenue.

3. Entice your partner to outperform

Remember, just giving the tools and education would not entice your partners to outperform. It would help if you motivated them with some monetary rewards.   

However, motivating partners whose core values sync with your company is elementary. This is because you swim towards the current and not against them. 

So, it is always advised that you formulate a channel partner enablement strategy that leverages channel partners to perform better with the available channel sales enablement resources.

5 Unavoidable tips to increase your channel enablement for your sales

The only aim of having channel sales enablement in your company is to enhance and ease your channel partner’s sales tasks.

To do so, here are the top 5 practices for making the best channel partner programs.

1. Product training

Product training is vital to increase your channel sales enablement. One of the primary reasons your channel partner will sell more is because of the benefits it brings to users.  

Hence, it is crucial that your channel partner is educated about the problem your product solves.

Product sales training could be done in multiple forms like hosting a session, providing tutorial videos, webinars, or any other mode.

2. Case studies

Case studies are more persuasive than any other marketing or selling tool.

You can consider your previous channel partners as your case study to educate your current affiliates and partners.

This can be done by introducing your new partners to the process, guidelines, target achievements, and many other things that educate them about your business and motivate them to be the best channel partner.

3. Easy access to enablement material

You need to ensure these training and other tools are accessible and memorable for the channel partners to perform efficiently.

To make it accessible, you need to make the links, videos, articles, and other informative forms available.

By providing the right resources, your channel partners can understand your products and service in-depth, enabling them to sell better.

4. Offer more sales-targeted resources

Offering more sales-targeted resources means offering practical tools, well-structured programs, insightful data, target audience information, and so on.  

You should make sure that nothing is missing from your end. And that as a parent company, you have provided all the necessary information and facilities that are required.

5. Incentives and rewards

Incentives and rewards are an unavoidable part of sales. You can increase your channel enablement for sales by offering attractive monetary rewards.

For example, you must have seen affiliate programs wherein the affiliates earn a certain percentage from the sales they make for the company.

By providing additional rewards, your channel sales partners will be more inclined towards bringing revenue to your business.

How Salesmate can help channel sales enablement

Salesmate is a unified customer platform that enables companies to enhance their channel sales process.

Whether it’s sharing resources or providing training, you can manage every single task from Salesmate, the best channel sales enablement software.

Here’s how you can leverage the powerful features of Salesmate for your channel sales enablement –

• Automate and improve the channel sales process of your partners with sales automation.
• Solve the queries of your partners with seamless communication channels – built-in calling, emails, text messaging, and live chat.
• Provide demos and video training with Google Meet and Microsoft Teams integration with Salesmate.
• Get your documents e-signed with different partners with DocuSign integration.
• Keep a track of every progress with insightful sales reports.

With these features, you can successfully execute your channel sales enablement process and grow your business.

Get started with Salesmate and try out its powerful features to improve your channel sales enablement process.

Final thoughts

Channel sale enablement is an essential step when executing a channel sales strategy. It helps speed up the process and empowers your channel partners to achieve their goals and targets.

Therefore, with the right approach toward channel sales, your business has the potential to grow at an exponential rate. Implement the tips mentioned in the article and level up your business process!