Business Development 101. We see lots of companies out there that decide to go through third party channels in order to take their products to market, yet neglect to put the necessary resources and structure around building, deploying, managing, and executing this third party channel strategy. Those companies assume that by outsourcing the sales of their products of those third party channels, they don't need to invest in providing the support or infrastructure or services or training to those channel partners in order to make them a success. Well, companies that have been in the business of successfully growing their companies through third party channels know better.

The best practices today for channel development and business development and channel management really call for a very proactive, targeted, systematic approach to managing those resellers and the companies that are out acting as channel partners for your product. Back in the dot bomb days, there were lots of companies that were looking for strategic partnerships and signing them up in droves, yet not getting any traction from any of those relationships, and spending a lot of time and resources trying to create them, only to find out that they didn't actually bring them any business. In today's day and age, channel development and business development is all about execution. And so, if your company is trying to grow, and trying to use those third party channels to do so, it has to take a more realistic approach about what it's going to take in order to get those channel partners to sell your product through to your end user customers.

Building a system of services, support, lead generation, training, field sales, partnering, and marketing for your channel partners is absolutely critical. The best companies are even offering channel marketing portals, where they can distribute collateral and work in a distributed model with CRM, in order to share leads, track them, and make sure that they're automating the whole process of partnership with their channel partners. So, companies that are doing a great job of building sales through third party distribution channels, in today's day and age, are the ones who are taking a proactive, investment approach to building, managing, and winning their distribution channels away from their competition. Many companies that are suffering in the channel development or business development area have old relationships that aren't producing. If your company is in that situation and is stuck with a group of manufacturer's reps, system integrator, VARs or OEMs or other types of resellers that aren't producing any sales for your company, there is a way out.

Sometimes, in order to make your way through that process though, it's best to bring in an outside resource to help you to do an independent assessment of your channel partners and help you to take your channel relationships through radical change. The process of building and maintaining a high performance, third party distribution channel network is one of pruning and tuning, constantly looking at which companies are producing and performing and building them up and constantly looking at the ones that are not and figuring out how to put them on a corrective action plan, or calling them out of your distribution channel network and replacing them. Working with resellers for your products is much like working for your own direct sales force. And the more that you view them as a resource that is under you control than one that you have to influence through your management tactics and through your support services, the better chance you'll have of actually turning them into productive channel that actually drives revenue into the door for your company.

Many companies make the mistake of hiring resellers for their products and then leaving them to their own devices. A lot of times this is done in the international arena, and all of us know that this is a common mistake that can be corrected, but it requires dusting off your business development playbook and taking a fresh look at who you're distribution channel partners are, where they're at, whether or not they can take you where you want to go, and what's it's going to take to take your channel relationships through change, in order to get the revenue and product growth that you want for your company.