5 Ways to Get Your SaaS Offering Channel-Ready

Reach — Building up an impressive client list is no easy task. Think about how many sales reps will you need to get the reach you want. With tens of thousands channel partners serving the same customers you want to buy your product, leveraging the channel can help you accomplish this goal faster.

Support — Providing your own support reps will take time and money to train. If your product has substantial potential, and you don’t build an adequate support team, it just might become a bottleneck to your success. Selling your SaaS solution through the IT channel gives you access to more support that’s ready to act. Top cloud distributors deliver their managed service provider (MSP) client’s valuable sales, marketing and leadership content.

Brand Awareness — Half of the success in any space relies on product awareness. Building your own brand awareness might be muted if customers ultimately check a source other than your company website to learn more about your product and brand. Think about the power of reviews. This is where the channel lives. Customers will ask channel partners about the products and brands they come across. If your ideal customers’ advisers don’t know your solution exists, sales are likely to suffer.

Partner Management Console — Build it and they will come. Being easy to work with is a big part of whether your solution will receive favor from the channel. Imagine a partner having 50-100 customers on average. Accessing each of these accounts individually through separate logins would be a hassle. Having a central management platform in place that makes access and management easy is a must-have.

… month-to-month options instead of the typical 12-to-36-month contracts. Think about the following to get your solution channel-ready: Support monthly billing terms, enable proration of services, and allow co-termination if longer term subscriptions are desired by customers.

Demonstrate channel commitment. Going it alone can be tough. Without support from the IT channel, you could easily find yourself not only putting in more effort than is necessary, but also struggling to build long-term, trusting and sticky relationships. Harnessing the help of the channel enables you to scale your business faster and more effectively.

Integrate using APIs. To assure that product acquisition and billing is moving at the speed of business, it’s important to provide open application programming interfaces (APIs) to your solution, especially for provisioning and billing. Automation is the key to frictionless product acquisition and usage. Can you deliver: instant provisioning; support moves, adds, changes and cancellations anytime; and automated billing updates?

Seek out partnerships. Finding experts to help you navigate the ever-evolving channel ecosystem is essential. No reason to drive into common potholes and pitfalls. Best practices are out there — use the collective knowledge of your IT community to help you can avoid rookie mistakes, better empower your customers and stay apprised of the direction of the industry.