2 Ways to Maximize Your Vendor Relationship

As channel partners, we get hammered all the time to sell vendor’s stuff – even if it is unreasonable or doesn’t fit our customer base.

We all have primary vendors, vendors that are significant lines of revenue. We also have secondary vendors. (We might even like them more.) The one thing most vendors have in common is that they have large catalogs of business services.

One way to get deeper into a vendor (and also deeper into customers) is to sell more than one line of business. This would require some work as you would be farming your base of customers to upsell or cross-sell them another product. It would mean a lot to the vendor – and to your pocketbook. In addition, if you have multiple services with a client, the churn is lower and the lifetime value of the customer increases exponentially (with you longer and paying you more – BAM!)

Align your business with the right partner. The partner you choose should meet a specific criteria that includes a corresponding target market as your customers and similar values.

When Greg Plum and I were speaking today, the MSP model came up as a good example of how a partner makes a living on recurring revenue models.

Smartbox by Panterra is free. Startup Meeting is $25. Phones lines for a 10 employee office are $300. RMM will get you $7 per machine (so $70). Backup is $99. Office365 is $9 per user (so $90). Add it all up to get an account that you can afford to support they way you want to.

If you only sold one service, you would need have a thousand clients – all ready to churn because you only have one product and you can’t afford to service them well on the income (commission).

Dell in the UK announced they will be offering VoIP via Vonage. It’s runs about $20 per month. It would need to be just one of the services sold to that business, which is the Dell plan. “Dell’s Enterprise Mobility Management service has debuted a new service called Business Phone Service which is pitched as a virtual smartphone service…. The solution, which is part of Dell’s Mobile Workspace, offers Box for Dell as well as Microsoft Office 365 email integration.” Email, storage, voice – 3 of the big services for businesses. See how that bundling thing works?!

Tags: bundle, channel partners, dell, msp, voip
Related tags: service, business, vendors, services, vendor, office