To remain competitive in the current economic scenario, it has become almost mandatory to increase the engagement between IT companies and the channel partners. In most business models, channel partners play the role of an extended sales team. And in such a scenario, partners will increasingly play a strategic and domain-rich role in the go-to-market activities of IT software solution companies. Typically for an IT vendor, partner organisations would include system integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), consulting organisations, resellers, and value-added distributors (VADs).

IT companies have to unveil a broad outreach strategy for their partners to ensure that their partners are able to generate good growth figures as well as deliver greater value on the back of increasing expertise and specialization. Such strategies could differ from company to company depending on the nature of the industries that they operate in. But I believe that the basic contours of such a strategy should include the following partner-enabling programmes.

Set Up Partner Group
Partners should be able to gain access to all the tools, resources, and benefits needed to support their entire business lifecycle. You may decide to set up your own infrastructure for the group but the group should be able to derive benefits from engagement such as sales and technical training. You must also create credibility for them in the market by providing them with best practices, help them achieve sales results by providing them with avenues for leveraging market opportunities, and ensuring availability of resources on a 24x7 and single point of access basis.

IT companies need to find ways to combine partner expertise with the strengths of their product lines and activate joint go-to-market strategies based on such collaboration. The key outcome for such a group should be that it should add value to the end consumer.

Educate Your Channel
IT companies should collaborate with partners to research and develop solutions for their respective markets. Apart from a partner group, a focused single research and development network can be developed. Within this network partners can build, test, adopt, and also showcase leading-edge technology innovations across markets. This will enhance the go-to-market capabilities of the partners.

Aim for Channel Reach
It has become imperative in a highly competitive market for Indian IT companies to reach out to the emerging segment of the market — the mid-sized companies. Companies need to extend their channel network and establish a second line of resellers to reach out to the market. The process for reselling should be made extremely easy for these channel partners such as nil or negligible upfront financial investment requirements, technical support, and resource availability and training. Bottlenecks should be removed from the ordering process for these channel partners. Marketing support should also be made available such as roadshows, advertisements, etc.

The solutions provided in this space should be easy to install and configure and also cater to any budget size. Because of the nature of the market, customers should be able to start at a low-entry level and upgrade as per their requirements. The key to success in this segment of the market along with your extended channel partners is to be able to lower the total cost of ownership of IT solutions for these mid-sized customers or companies.

A channel strategy based on the above strategies will enable partners to play a critical and essential role in selling, deploying, and implementing software to customers. Market conditions will demand close working relationships for IT companies with their channel partners to drive growth.

IT companies must unveil more strategies for partners to ensure they are able to generate good growth figures.