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Joint marketing success: How to strengthen cooperation with your sales partners
As a company, one of the most important goals is to generate the highest possible turnover by selling your own products or services. This project is particularly challenging when sales are not carried out centrally but through distribution partners. As a result, the company must be able to fully rely on the efforts of the partners, as they are ultimately responsible for selling the products and acquiring customers. Sales partners are the people who establish direct contact with end customers, represent the company and provide information about the products. Of course, sales partners are also interested in generating the highest possible turnover and thus profit. However, some of these partners not only sell a company's product or service, but also have competing products in their range. It is particularly important for a company to attach great importance to partnerships with distribution partners. When marketing, partners usually value not only the quality of the product, but also the simpler marketing processes. Read how you can work together successfully and how incentives and motivations can lead to a win-win situation for you and your sales partners:
1. Strengthen sales partnership
Ideally, the partnership between the company and the distribution partners is such that both benefit from it. The sales partners bring the products and services to customers and in return receive marketing support, discounts or special product training from the head office. For this cooperation to work, a continuous exchange helps, in which the partners can share their needs, suggestions and problems and inform the company about further information, new additions, content of campaigns and product features. In addition, through direct contact with customers, sales partners know the needs of the target group, which in turn can be relevant for future strategy and product planning. In general, it helps to look at the cooperation in a spirit of partnership and not dictatorial and to involve sales partners right from the start when planning marketing. Only if they know the overall marketing goals can the individual actions and campaigns be carried out effectively and strategically.
2. Make marketing materials available to sales
In order for these plans to ultimately work, it is particularly important to support sales partners in active marketing and to provide them with enough diverse marketing materials and the right content. Ideally, the head office should specify the direction and campaign plan for local marketing in order to generate consistent brand communication with the outside world. However, distribution partners are often responsible for adapting the content regionally and individualizing it for customers. In this way, stringent but individual marketing is achieved, which gives partners the necessary freedom to find their personal marketing mix and promote sales. The choice of materials should be varied and wisely chosen. Through close contact, the head office can focus on the needs of the partners and thus provide a suitable selection of advertising materials.
3. Create an overview of advertising measures through a marketing service portal
Marketing portals, which can be used as an advertising platform, are suitable for providing these marketing materials. In such a system, the head office can release templates for planned marketing campaigns for local processing. The sales partners supplement the materials with regional offers and their personal contact details in order to use this content for local marketing. Marketing portals also offer solutions for sharing campaign and budget plans as well as the specification of corporate design information (brand center/brand portal). Ideally, the portals have an open system structure, which allows internal CRM and DAM systems to be connected directly and the stored data can be used. In addition to the simple creation of marketing materials, this results in a platform on which information can be retrieved easily and in an orderly manner and the sales partner receives marketing recommendations that he can implement locally with just a few clicks.
4. Identify and fix problems
In order not only to establish a good partnership with sales, but also to further optimize it for the future, feedback is a particularly important part of cooperation. Only through continuous consultations and feedback loops can the company identify the difficulties and challenges in sales and provide solutions for them. Be it a specific product for which training is still needed, or a new marketing channel such as social media, which should be more focused in the future - problems can be solved at an early stage through the exchange between headquarters and partners. It is also important to recognize why certain advertising materials are not being used and accepted by partners. These are common reasons that the general material or content is not suitable for the local target group or that, due to a lack of communication, it does not even reach the distribution partners in the first place. Surveys can also be used for analysis, which can be created and evaluated directly via the marketing portal.
5. Provide and motivate incentives
In addition to the right marketing materials, organization in a marketing portal and constant exchange between sales and headquarters, incentive systems can also motivate sales partners to do more marketing for their own offers and thus sell more products. Depending on the success of the partners, for example, certain purchases and advertising material can be made available for the point of sale or exclusive sales discounts can be given. Marketing portals also offer the option of distributing advertising subsidies for specific materials or campaigns. In this way, the head office can create additional incentives, for example for new channels or measures, and give sales the opportunity to break new ground.
In general, when working with sales partners, there is therefore communication on equal footing and partnership-based planning and implementation throughout marketing. If you would like to discuss this topic, feel free to contact us at any time. We welcome every exchange.