Channel Recruitment & Management Case Study
Overview
CSD helps a technology peripherals company achieve a five fold increase in preferred reseller partners while strengthening relationships and developing powerful market intelligence.
Situation Analysis
- The client had a minimal number of identified resellers and their distribution sales model gave them incomplete information on the identity and profile of their existing resellers.
- They needed to understand who their current resellers were, why those resellers sought their products, how to foster closer relationships with the existing resellers and how to recruit new resellers.
Action/Solution
- CSD collaborated with the client to develop an ideal partner profile (IPP) to guide the intelligence gathering and recruitment segments of the program.
- From a database of 3,000 existing resellers, CSD implemented a contact discovery campaign to profile the account and determine the resellers’ level of activity with the client’s products.
- Active resellers, which numbered about 1,000, were interviewed to ascertain their chief concerns, as well as which initiatives which would induce them to sell more of the vendor’s products.
- Inactive resellers were evaluated to establish the reason for their inactivity. After assessing the cause of the inactivity and promoting the value of the client’s products, CSD converted 500 inactive resellers back into the “active” category.
- Unconverted “inactives” were scrubbed from the database and the list was pared down to 1,500 highly qualified resellers that met the client’s IPP.
- Using a second database of 50,000 contacts (based upon the vendor’s IPP), CSD qualified and recruited a multitude of new resellers and created the customer base to which the vendor would sell.
Value/Results
- The client fostered relationships with 10,000 preferred resellers – a five-fold increase from the number of active resellers they had prior to the program.
- The additional market intelligence helped the vendor improve its market promotions and greatly improved market share.
- By soliciting input and feedback from resellers, the client also strengthened their channel partnerships, and the positive relationship has continued for more than seven years.
