Channel Sales is a great strategy for extending your sales reach. Known by many names – indirect sales, resellers, affiliates, and distributors- channel partners sell for multiple vendors at once. These relationships can be a powerful growth strategy but come with challenges.
Instead of selling one product for one organization, resellers often have to be a “jack of all trades” and sell multiple products from a wide variety of vendors. In fact, when it comes to dealing with resellers, it is often the easiest brand to sell, not price, that is the deciding factor when resellers put their bids together.
Intelligent demo automation can help remove some of the strain of juggling so many organizations at once and make your brand the easiest option for channel partners to sell.
Here’s how it’s done. Demo automation removes confusion around your vendors’ offerings and empowers you with content and insights that create and build momentum in deals without taxing your presales teams.
Vendors who already use sales demo environments can purchase channel-specific licenses that allow them to share their content with resellers, who in turn share with their clientele.
Channel partners can also procure their own demo creation platform and either work with their vendors to create demos for their solutions or have them share their demos with them (assuming your platforms are the same or compatible).
Benefits of Adding Demo Automation to Channel Sales Strategies
Channel Sales reps are pressured to become well-versed in multiple solutions. Using demo automation, you can create a cohesive strategy using demo creation software and interactive product demos to increase market reach, establish credibility, and stay on the same page as each of your partners.
- Create bigger deals by adding value to every interaction.
- Close deals faster by eliminating demo lag time.
- Sell more products by giving channel sales reps access to emos for your entire portfolio.
- Provide a tailored demo experience with every view.
- Get detailed insights into who your resellers are selling to.
- Make the buyer journey easier by enabling customers to watch demos on-demand.
- Get consistent brand messaging and alignment with channel partners.
Enough of the why, let’s move on to the how-to.
Demo Automation Best Practices for Channel Sales
You don’t need to be a demo master to make masterful demos. In fact, your audience will appreciate authenticity over highly polished demos that feel like a commercial.
Platforms like Consensus are flexible enough to fit your needs. Here are some places to add demo automation to your Channel Sales efforts.
- Create internal training. Use demo automation to equip your reps with the knowledge they need to sell for multiple vendors.
- Follow up with vendors frequently. Check back quarterly to make sure you’re using the most updated product information and branding.
- Provide visibility to your vendors. Sharing the analytics from your demos helps your vendors understand your progress.
- Demo Qualify leads. Get in the habit of requiring customers to watch a demo before a live meeting and watch the number of unqualified demos drop.
- Align your demos to the buyer journey. Following the six demo types, create demos that fit to the stages buyers go through every sale.
- Call-to-action button in email campaigns. When reaching out through email, include a “Watch a Demo” button. Instead of asking your customers to jump through hoop after hoop, let them watch the demos they want when they want to.
- Sell between meetings. Use demos as a leave behind after live calls and ask buyers to review them as they meet to discuss solutions.
It’s Not a Matter of If But When
Channel sales relationships are a win-win for many vendors. Your partners get to sell a wide variety of products, and you get extra sales. However, being able to juggle multiple solutions at once is difficult.
Set your resellers up for success. Don’t force them to dig through tons of materials hoping they will be able to recite that info to your customers accurately. Instead, enable them with ready-made content that covers features and functions authentically without making your channel sales reps take a master class on your solution. This foolproof method gives you a curated talk track, and they get insights into your conversations.
