Market Positioning for Channel Resellers

Resellers that look identical to one another compete on price, and the vendor pays for it twice: once in margin and again in the partners who leave because the business stopped being worth doing. Partner positioning is the activity that prevents that, and it is one of the highest-return things a vendor can help a partner with, because every campaign, pitch and quote that follows is shaped by it.

This ebook covers how to help channel partners differentiate from one another and carve out a market position of their own. It is free to download below.

Why positioning is a vendor problem too

It is tempting to treat a partner's positioning as the partner's own business. In a channel it is not, because the vendor decides how many partners sell the same thing into the same market. Recruit forty resellers with overlapping customer bases and identical propositions, and price is the only variable left for them to compete on. The resulting discounting is usually blamed on partner behaviour when it was in fact designed in at recruitment.

Positioning is also what makes co-marketing work. A campaign built on a partner's genuine specialism says something a customer cannot get from the vendor's own marketing. A campaign built on a partner with no distinct position is the vendor's campaign with a different logo, which is why so much market development fund spend returns so little.

Where it is taught

Partner positioning is Module 6 of the Certificate in Channel Management and Module 3 of the Certificate in Channel Marketing, which approaches it from the campaign side. Each certificate runs over ten modules against a published syllabus, online and self-paced, about 20 hours of study, ending in an exam with a 70% pass mark. The syllabus is reviewed and approved by a vendor-independent Industry Advisory Council of 27 senior channel leaders at companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and SAP.

Related

The channel partner marketing plan template puts positioning at the front of campaign planning, where it belongs. Partner marketing training covers the discipline in full. Successful channel partner programs explains where positioning sits among the ten factors, and channel partner recruitment covers the decision that creates the problem in the first place.