Have a conversation with the management and a few sellers of the sales channel and understand,

• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• And what do they need to successfully sell your products?

1.Right Messaging strategy

You need to keep a consistent communication going with the channel partners. Send regular communications to them on:

• Your market and industry updates
• Competitor information
• Information about the new product or feature releases
• Information about the offers that are lined-up

This helps in driving top-of-the-mind recall amongst the channel sales reps You may differ the content and frequency of your communication from channel partner to channel partner, depending upon the maturity of the relationship

2. Right Training

It’s critical to empower your channel partners with the right training in order to make them knowledgeable and sales-ready.

• Organize instructor-led training sessions once every quarter and train them on
  • Your Products and services
  • Market
  • Competitors
  • The technology platforms that they need to use etc
• Also, create a digital academy where you put up all the study materials, collaterals, best practices, case studies, demo videos, etc. This way the channel reps can easily access any piece of training content and learn whenever they need

3. Right Engagement

Driving engagement is a crucial part of the partner enablement program. Your partners need to be engaged in their training and work in order to excel in their job.

• Conduct sales contests with various interesting themes like NFL, March Madness, etc
• Conduct theme-based contests around learning as well to make the learning fun and interesting for the reps
• Have them regularly participate in various training activities like taking quizzes, video coaching assignments, etc
• Put up the names of the top performers in the contests on a live leaderboard and reward them with virtual points and badges
• Provide them the option of redeeming these points for some exciting gift vouchers

Here are a few ways to regularly reinforce knowledge and keep your training activities continuous:

Microlearning: Break down the lengthy training content into smaller nuggets. Then, convert these nuggets into interesting media formats like infographics, animated videos, podcasts, storyboards, etc, and deliver them to the learners regularly on their mobile devices.

These Microlearning feeds help the learners to:

• Quickly and easily learn and digest the crisp training content
• Retain and remember that content for a long time
• Access and refer to it at any time and from anywhere. Just with a few clicks on their mobile devices

Quizzes: Conduct short quiz tests with about 5-10 questions, once or twice every week. Each time you can choose a different topic to conduct the quiz test on. Like,

• Product knowledge
• Market knowledge
• Competitor information
• Customers’ information etc

Video Coaching: Assign video coaching assignments to the channel reps and ask them to record a video of themselves demonstrating their sales conversation skills and submit it.

You can then review the submitted videos and give a score based on the performance. And, you can also give constructive feedback through which the participants can improve themselves going forward.

Also, you can select a particularly good video of a participant and mark it as a “Top Video” and share it with everyone. This helps the channel sales team to learn from the best and adopt some sales best practices.

Whenever you are about to,

• Bring in a change in your sales process
• Or introduce new products
• Or begin new initiatives

Here are some ways to gamify the enablement process:

• Conduct polls and surveys in the middle of the instructor-led training sessions. Gamify those polls by rewarding the ones who give the most accurate and creative answers in the polls
• Gamify learning activities like quizzes and video coaching . Reward the reps with the highest score in the quizzes and video coaching with exciting prizes
• You can also gamify various small and big sales activities. For example, you can reward
  • The reps who sell the highest number of units of a new product
  • The reps who bring in the highest amount of quarterly or annual revenue
  • The rep who closes more number of deals
  • The rep who brings in the highest number of leads in a day
  • Those who make 100 calls everyday
  • The person who holds the highest number of demos in a week etc

Basically here, you take 3 subjects every month. For example, this month you take

• USP
• Competitive data
• Value selling

• Sending them regular knowledge reinforcement, study materials, training videos, etc
• Conducting quizzes and video coaching to test their proficiency

Hold kickoff meetings for all your channel partners every year. This provides a great opportunity for them to

• Learn more about your company
• Discover new things about your business
• Meet with your company’s executives
• Meet and collaborate with the other channel partners

Here is how you can do that:

• Conduct regular surveys (once or twice a month) and ask the channel sellers,
  • What do they think of your training
  • How useful has it been for them
  • And, what would they want to change or improvement
• Measure activity metrics of the channel sellers like,
  • The number of leads brought in by each seller
  • Number demos given each week
  • The average conversion rate etc
• Lastly, you need to keep a track and see if your organizational goals are being met consistently. Like,
  • If your channel partners have consistently met the monthly or quarterly goals that are set for them
  • If they are meeting the revenue targets of the company
  • If they are making the profits that you desire
  • If they are able to successfully introduce your new products and sell them in the market