In salesforce.com’s State of Sales 3rd generation report, 86% of top-performing salespeople say qualified leads are essential for Channel Partners.
Lead generation for your channel partners and resellers should be a vital part of your channel marketing strategy. No channel sales enablement process that aims for partner success is complete without helping them land the leads that turn into sales.
In this article, we’ll discuss 7 ways you can help your partners generate more leads.
One high-ROI way to bring attention to your business and generate leads is by capitalizing on search engine optimization (SEO).
This works for any business with a website and can work for your partners as well, as long as they do it the right way. The problem is optimizing for search engines like Google is a specialist skill, and chances are your partners will have to hire a professional to get this done for them.
But for a decent enough SEO, you can provide them with a checklist that contains certain actions to take to get their optimization game up to speed and attract more free organic traffic to their site.
Start with the long-tail keywords that your ideal customer is most likely to use in search of your products/services. When partners complete the checklist, they should be able to garner free attention to get leads on the internet.
What if your partners don’t have the budget to dive into a full-blown marketing and sales campaign that gives them a competitive advantage in lead generation? You can help with an integral aspect of channel partner enablement — providing marketing templates.
This can include:
This way, you’ll help your resellers and partners to attract and nurture web traffic in a way that turns them into warm leads. Landing pages are at the top of the sales funnel and emails guide them further down. They cannot afford to lose the bulk of your prospects at this point.
How can partners consistently fill their sales pipeline with leads? When they have the skills to generate leads on demand. You can help them do this by providing the training necessary to leverage various lead generation techniques that exist in the digital marketing domain.
Working with a lead generation agency for this purpose is quite easy. Get them to educate your partners on the practical steps they can take to predictably find customers.
Did you know that B2B buyers engage with 13 pieces of content before buying? Content is at the core of any online marketing campaign. So, you and your partners need to create content to generate leads.
Even though your partners have some responsibility to create content to attract potential customers, they look up to you to head the content creation process.
You can use content to collect information about interested web visitors by gating it behind a registration form. Types of content you can use for this are:
Resellers and partners can repurpose this content—such as translating to the language in their local area—and use them to get more leads.
Also, creating offers such as a tool or free service that your ideal audience will find too irresistible to pass up is an excellent way to get sales leads. You can help develop tools or suggest other offers for your partners to use.
One thing that can foster a sense of togetherness and loyalty is a thriving community that cares for each other's success. You can host one of such communities for your channel partners and give them opportunities to offer ideas and help each other.
It is in such a supportive environment that you can share success stories of partners who are converting leads well. Share their methods and strategies — when other partners emulate those strategies, it can create a cascading wave of success across the channel.
According to Backlinko, there were 3.9 billion active users of social media. That’s in 2020. It is definitely more now. Even though social media marketing isn’t a new concept, many people are yet to fully incorporate it into their lead generation strategy even though the ROI is high. For instance, LinkedIn has 2x the buying power of an average web audience.
This is where you come in: Encourage your partners to turn to social media to find the users of your products/services. For B2C, you’ll want to look at the largest audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For B2B audiences, the best places are LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube. But Facebook and Instagram are highly rewarding for both audiences.
On social media, brands can consistently publish valuable content, engage with customers and prospects, and run ads that will continue to be rewarding in generating leads.
7. Organize eventsBefore social distance restrictions, trade shows and conferences were a great way to connect with prospects face-to-face. Now, you can host the same events but virtually. This will give your partners opportunities to connect with potential customers via their “virtual booths”.
Partners can also host their own virtual events. The best thing about this is that the absence of travel expenses can boost attendance numbers. Now you can reach more people with less effort and costs.
These events can be recorded and provided on-demand as additional marketing content for continuous lead generation. Partners can also repurpose the content as blog and social media posts to distribute it for more leads.
What is the first thing you would do to help your channel partners land more leads and succeed? Do you have more ideas? Share it in the comment box and we can feature it with your name (if you want) in future updates of this article.