Trisha Winter — May 22, 2017 
If have a reseller program, you know how much work it takes to get resellers qualified, trained and enabled. It’s worth it if they add to your revenue stream. But what happens when they don’t? They promised you that they had access to your target buyers and that their team was on board. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do beyond call it a sunk cost and move on to the next potential reseller. If this is a far too frequent scenario for you, it may make sense to consider a new approach to qualifying potential resellers – a referral program.
Ryan Morris, principal consultant at Morris Management Partners found in his research that “Everybody is churning, and yet [resellers] tend to churn and ramp and onboard very slowly, because there’s a lot of false starting.”
By establishing referral partner programs, you can both enable lower tier partners to be productive for you while also using it as a proving ground for potential resellers. Before you spend the time training and certifying, make sure they actually have connections with and influence over your target buyers by having them supply your sales team (or another reseller) with leads. Track these leads to a purchase and compensate these referral partners with a bounty or a percentage of revenue of the deal. Once the potential reseller reaches a threshold of successful referrals within a set time period, they will earn their right to become a trusted reseller.
With this extra step in the process, you’ve trained the reseller through the referral program on who your target buyer is and through reporting back to the reseller, they can see exactly which referrals lead to a purchase. Around 45% of channel companies pointed to their top pain point being the difficulty of doing business with vendors, (Channel Insider). But by qualifying resellers with a referral partner program they’ve got a head start going into training. Additionally, your team is more motivated to get them up and running quickly, because you know with certainty that they will be productive.
So what about the partners that never qualify with enough productivity? Well, they can still be a lower tier referral partner who occasionally brings in referral leads. This still adds to your revenue stream and compensates the partner for bringing forward that relationship. The more “failed” resellers that you have, the stronger the pipeline of your direct sales team. This makes sales happy and makes the channel team happy that they didn’t waste their time on training these partners to become resellers.
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