VAR Program Success Requires Innovation & Differentiation
By Wayne Monk, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel Sales, ASG Technologies
One of the primary challenges of working with a channel partner is identifying how, together, you can bring a unique and innovative solution to market that yields compelling value to your clients. At ASG, we aspire to work with partners that have a passion for building differentiated offerings powered by our technology and jointly execute well-crafted, precise go-to-market plans to create strong awareness and demand.
This willingness to focus and innovate on specific solutions or industries scares some VARs. They don’t want to be niche players. But we see tremendous value in being specific. To be successful at selling your product, you need to ensure you’re packaging it as a niche solution that addresses a very specific business challenge. From there, you can develop a go-to-market plan and supporting sales activity to quickly convert inquiries into revenue.
Some partners are reluctant to define themselves or their industry too specifically; they fear being pigeon-holed when they know they have a portfolio of solutions or services to offer. But we know they can be vastly more successful if they are clear about their differentiation and the unique value they can offer on top of our products. It really requires a focus on innovation and delivering unique IP.
Many VARs have built industry-specific advisory services or accelerators to augment their delivery; these should be packaged as solutions, not sold as one-offs or custom delivery engagements. VARs need to think, innovate and sell like product companies. This is what being a value-added channel really means: selling products wrapped with services and offering ongoing support. Think about it as moving from selling services to providing a product or managed/cloud service by embedding, or even private labeling, the vendor’s technology.
Trust VARs To Provide Unique Offerings
If our channel partners are not packaging our product in a way that brings incremental solutions or unique value, our sales team and customers view them as pure extensions of the vendor (aka, just more sales or delivery capacity). Many vendor sales teams and customers have the perception that the vendor resources know the software solution better than any third party and desire to engage directly with them. This may create channel conflict and increase partner management. However, if the partner presents some unique offerings then it is bringing something to the table that the vendor does not make available. Now, the vendor sales team and customers need the partner.
If we’re not taking advantage of the comprehensive host of capabilities and services that we, together, can offer, what are we doing? It’s simply transactional and low value at that point.
Encourage VARs To Sell Product Value
At the onset of a relationship, we hold solution development workshops with our partners to explore what innovation we might be able to bring to market together. We brainstorm the most compelling ways to present our solution to our target audiences. These sessions serve to assess our combined assets, identify opportunities to differentiate ourselves from the competition, and determine strategies for showcasing those differentiators in ways that will resonate with our customers and prospects.
As we go through the brainstorm sessions, our channel partners often realize that what we’re asking (i.e., to think and act like a product company) is not so different than what they’re already doing. Nine times out of ten, they’ve already begun the process of infusing value into our offering, whether they realize it or not. We simply encourage them to take their process a step further, identifying what they’re doing well and selling it into the product to develop a completely unique and innovative offering.
When channel partners sell our offering as a product, versus a service, their statement of work becomes a solution brief. They’re able to tell prospective customers exactly what the solution will do for them. As a result, the valuation of the solution goes up because audiences have greater clarity about what they’ll get out of the solution.
More importantly, we are able to create a more defined target market segment and more precise and compelling marketing messages to engage them. This typically results in better conversation rates and higher sales productivity.
Differentiation & Collaboration Are Key
I would advise vendors and channel partners to work closely together to innovate and bring something new to the market. Don’t emulate competitor models because you’ll end up with a watered-down program. Instead, focus on doing something different by offering something unique. Differentiation is the only way to get lift into new markets and meet your goals.
Software vendors should make sure to teach their partners what they need to know about the product and its attributes to set them up for success. Vendors must take the appropriate steps to empower their partners to drive revenue and win market share. Key to this is collaboration. Vendors and partners should put their heads together to determine how to accelerate the customer journey by selling the solution as a niche product. Then, they should discuss how to build and launch the product, how to effectively train the salesforce and how to govern success. If vendors and their channel partners can work together to be precise in their joint offering, messaging and marketing, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
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Wayne Monk is the Senior Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel Sales for ASG Technologies. Wayne has responsibility for overall channel strategy and establishing strategic partnerships, indirect channels and other routes to market to enable ASG and our partners to accelerate their growth and exploit new market opportunities. Wayne has 30 years of enterprise solution sales, marketing and channel management experience working with high growth technology companies. He has been fortunate to see all sides of the channel through senior management experience with global systems integrators, business partners, cloud / managed services providers and OEMs / technology alliance partners. Add to that, a unique blend of sales, marketing and technical expertise and Wayne is able to bring solid business experience to help lead organizations and partners to new heights. Wayne holds a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. He resides in Herndon, Virginia with his wife and has two children.
ASG Technologies Group Inc., founded in 1986, offers global enterprises information access, management and control. Its solutions empower businesses to enhance workforce productivity, gain an accurate and timely understanding of the information that underpins business decisions and address compliance needs with improved visibility of cross-platform data from legacy to leading edge environments.