Channel Partner Optimization: The Key to Unlocking Enterprise Revenue

The relationship between an enterprise company and its channel partners involves multiple stakeholders, each with their own priorities. While the enterprise needs to maintain brand consistency and messaging , the channel partner needs autonomy over how they sell their products and the ability to personalize the message to fit their business. While both stakeholders' needs are equally important, both parties need to think about the power of co-branding alongside managing the end customer’s expectations and the power that comes from blending these priorities to increase the bottom line. 

The channel partner ecosystem is one of hyper complexities, and it only continues to expand as the data-driven channel marketing landscape evolves with more integrated tech stacks. AI toolsets have given us the ability to fully automate processes, create content faster, and make more intelligent decisions better. With all these capabilities at our fingertips, how does one determine what technologies to integrate into their organizations? We are all on the right path, and the more programs we create for channel partners, the better – but let’s work smarter, not harder.  

 How do you start on this journey?

Historically selling through channel partners has always been a costly and time-sucking process. However, AI-driven content automation has changed the game in the channel partner space. With AI-driven content, companies are saving an immense amount of time and money and increasing revenue by investing in technology that takes the burden off the long-time manual processes. From the buyer's perspective, AI content can be created and optimized in a short period of time taking the experience to the next level.  

When you're selling through channel partners, your content must be right, and it must be “right now.”  This means that your sales and marketing teams must spend less time creating content, and more time enabling that content to be personalized and optimized for their channel partners. For every piece of content created in a channel marketing space, 10 or more iterations must be readily available for your partners to modify and optimize for their own customers' experience. For many, this task seems overwhelming and unattainable, and rightfully so. But with the benefit of automation, the heavy lifting of that customization is funneled through technology, so your marketing teams spend less time on the administrative customization, and more time doing what they do best.

Companies of all sizes, from small businesses to multi-national enterprises, depend on channel partners to help them sell products and services. But these partnerships are complex, and the #1 thing to consider from a strategic partner is their ability to implement.  When executed correctly, and with the buyer at center stage, the level of empowerment felt by channel partners can become a major paradigm shift in the relationship altogether. 

So why does this unlock enterprise revenue? 

There are a few things most channel partners can agree on, simplicity and the ability to see value from the partnership with their corporate organizations. By automating content optimization, you can transform that content into a recommendation engine for your channel partners, empowering them to connect with their buyers wherever they are on the buying journey. Although it sounds complex, automated optimization simplifies the process for your channel partner, making it easier for them to personalize your marketing content, thus selling more of your products. The easier it is for your channel partners to leverage, the more they will use it. This is an untapped revenue generator that can help your organization see drastic increases in revenue.  

The next is the timeliness of it all with a more real-time feedback loop from channel partners and buyers thus creating an innovative channel partner ecosystem. A recommended starting point is to create a chat bot that ties into machine learning. The  data collected is foundational to creating a knowledge bank. To take it to another level after the chat bot has been cooking for a while, start creating more advisory type responses that are contextual and at times longer.

For example, John walks into a service shop, Bill is behind the customer service desk. John asks a question about something specific from a supplier or manufacturer. Bill says, “I need to grab that from the back. So, while you wait patiently, here’s a good quality snippet that can answer your question” John watches and interacts with the iPad that was swiveled around to him . 60 seconds pass. Bill walks back up to the desk and looks at John. John immediately says “that was really cool. Can we add that warranty package to it as well? Bill smiles.   

John’s contact information was already in the system, so John got both a follow-up email and a text message. The email was a personalized response highlighting the questions that were answered during his interaction with Bill, and the text was to thank him with a coupon code for future purchases. This strategy can be utilized today, but it’s important to get your machine learning, AI, content, data, all intact. This is just one example of how we are adding value to the ecosystem by optimizing our channel partner’s content that in turn directly unlocks enterprise revenue. 

The simple takeaway from this article; focusing on your content production and automation, tying it to your machine learning AI model, and integrating with a through channel platform like ours can significantly unlock enterprise revenue.  

Our through channel platform delivers a total experience. We call it a Triptych, where marketing, sales, and the buyer are all integrated seamlessly into an empowering experience.