Channel sales enablement defined

Channel sales enablement is a practice of empowering indirect sales partners, resellers, and distributors to sell your company’s products and services.

A successful channel enablement program typically includes training, tools, content, and sales and marketing resources to assist partners with bringing solutions to market.

The aim of channel enablement is to enhance and ease your channel partner’s sales by providing them with the necessary knowledge and resources to sell more effectively.

Benefits of channel sales enablement

Channel sales enablement ensures that channel partners have the same information and resources that are provided to your own direct sales reps to represent and sell your solutions. It gives you the ability to manage, measure, and maintain a consistent and scalable channel marketing strategy and measurable indirect sales.

But a mature and active channel sales enablement is not just a direct sales boon, it also protects and grows your brand. It helps you make sure your customers always get the right information and best experience possible whether they’re buying directly from you or from your partners.

The key benefits of having channel sales enablement in place as outlined by Gartner® are:

  1. More deals: Channel enablement can help your company increase your market share by exposing more and new customers to your brand and products. It effectively expands the size of your sales force without having to bring on more in-house reps.
  2. Bigger deals: Partnering with the right resellers and distributors and enabling them to sell your products more effectively grants you and your partners cross-sell and upsell opportunities, as well as strategic reach to more lucrative markets.
  3. Faster deals: Help companies close deals faster by providing partners with the necessary tools and resources to educate customers, win their trust, and accelerate the sales process.
  4. Margin expansion: Help companies expand their margins by enabling partners to sell more effectively and at higher prices, as well as by reducing customer acquisition cost.

Four Goals for Sales Channel Partners chart

For example, IoT (internet of things) provider Digi International uses their sales enablement platform to educate and engage their channel partners and have achieved 2000% adoption and 182% revenue growth in the process.

Challenges for channel enablement programs and managers

Whether you’re a team of one or twenty, effectively enabling your channel partners to sell your products and achieving these goals is a complex problem that requires constant maintenance.

According to analysts, in-house experts, and Bigtincan customers, the six biggest obstacles for channel enablement programs and managers are:

  1. Winning mindshare with partner and resellers: Channel enablement is all about solving the question, “How do we get our partners to wake up in the morning, think about our products and brand, and then go out and sell for us? This is the biggest and most common problem for all channel managers and programs.
  2. Maintaining regular and constructive communication with partners to build solid, lasting relationships.
  3. Lack of control over the sales process, product pitches, and customer service.
  4. Lack of visibility into your partner’s sales process, performance, and treatment of your brand.
  5. Lack of sales training and content to effectively and efficiently onboard partners and keep existing partners up to date with news, offers, and collateral.
  6. Lack of internal resources and employees to support partners in addition to your own teams and initiatives.

Get a deep dive into the details and solutions for each of these challenges in this article.

Channel sales enablement best practices

Best practices for channel sales enablement include:

  • Providing product education
  • Keeping partners motivated
  • Focusing on partner’s needs
  • Making enablement practical and actionable
  • Addressing both hard and soft skills

When it comes to onboarding and product training, the Three Simple Keys To Engage and Educate Your Channel Sellers, as explained in the article are:

  1. Format and approachability of training resources. Are training resources accessible and digestible so resellers actually have and/or take the time to engage with them?
  2. Consistency of training. Onboarding is only the first step. Training, especially for sellers who aren’t part of your organization, has to be continuous for information and messaging to sink in.
  3. The quality of the training experience. Are your training materials old, outdated, boring, difficult to access, or hard to understand? Keep training materials fresh and exciting for the best results. Use techniques like microlearning to feed partners small bites of information repeatedly over time so they actually absorb it and commit it to memory.

Microlearning course product shot

But training is only one piece of the puzzle. Providing sales and marketing content, measuring partner performance, and having an easy way to stay in touch are also essential to successful channel enablement. All of this is best and most easily and accurately done through channel partner training software.

What is Channel enablement software?

Channel enablement software can take the form of an enablement platform or PRM (partner relationship management) system.

A partner enablement tool that all partners can access improves training, engagement, communication, visibility, performance, and collaboration. Most sales enablement systems with content management and analytics capabilities have all the right tools and tracking you need for channel partner enablement.

They allow you to see platform, training, and content adoption, selling behaviors, what assets reps use the most or don’t use at all, how often they’re logging in or looking at content, plus metrics such as sales volume, customer satisfaction, and partner engagement. This can even include regular reporting on customer feedback and inventory levels as well as chat capabilities for quick, easy communication in-platform.

This data also signals when it’s time for an outreach or content update to stay top of mind.

Learning analytics dashboard product shot

And short of planting someone at every partner location to monitor every interaction and scrape data, channel partner training software is the only way you’re going to get the information you need for optimal channel performance.

How to use channel enablement software

How you use channel enablement software will depend on the nature of your partner enablement programs, which industry you’re in, and the unique needs of your organization and each of your partners’.

But there are key features to look for that will serve all or the majority of your use cases.

Your channel enablement software should have:

  • Mobile-first design and offline access
  • Easy-to-use content management and customization
  • Sales training made easy
  • Automation of admin tasks for sales reps
  • CRM integration for pipeline visibility
  • Useful channel sales metrics
  • Communication and collaboration tools

Get examples, details, and a look at all of these features in: Channel partner enablement: What it is, plus the best platform to make it work.

Examples of channel enablement

Here are a few case studies demonstrating how companies in different industries find success with their channel enablement solution. Follow the links to read and/or watch each of these examples.