Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Using channels

I recently had an opportunity to talk to one of the software vendors that I was using on one of my projects. The account manager indicated that they had too much business in their installation backlog, and couldn’t meet all their demand.

This became an opportunity to explore a partnership with that vendor. What’s great about this?

Channel partners give two great benefits if you can find the right ones. First - you get another way to talk to your existing clients. You can offer new services, or new products with a new perspective. Secondly - you get access to new clients. Your channel partner also has a new way to talk to their clients - and might be able to represent your products & services to their clients.

Hopefully the new business is beneficial to everyone. I’ll be exploring one of these types of channel partnerships with the software vendor (I’m offering value-added consulting/integration services). We’ll see how it goes. Negotiations first, and then execution.

I know there’s a long way to go before this channel starts to pay out. I’ll have to invest in training and resource allocations, so this investment comes with some risk, and we’ll have to see how it goes. I’ll keep you posted.

However - I thought I’d pass along the thought to see if this post might cause anyone to start thinking about utilizing their partners to gain a path to new business.

Posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under ProCore Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.