Finding great partners to work with is hardly an easy task. Great partners are not found over night, the truly great ones have been developed over time through communication, training and support. The hardest part of identifying new channel partners is who do you start with. Instead of going after every channel partner that fits your general demographic, get more specific by creating an Ideal Partner Profile.

Example:

Gold Partner:

• Size: >50 employees
• # of Sales people: 10
• # of Technical people: 20
• Company Revenue: $20M
• Certifications: Microsoft, VMware, Symantec, IBM, Vizioncore, other related solutions.

Size of companies they sell to: Mid-size and large businesses. Based on customer survey, 45% of end-users that have Acronis deployed are within $10M-$500M in revenue.
Business focus: Partner focus should be on services related to multiple server level disaster recovery, database recovery, virtual backups and large server migration/consolidations.

Having this information gives you and your teams clarity on who you should be focusing on. If you are recruiting new partners, having an Ideal Partner Profile lets you quickly scan over a resellers business to identify if they are the right fit for your channel program.

For you Channel Sales managers, having this information makes it clear to them that the partners they are dealing with DO have the potential to produce revenue for your company.

Many companies have an idea of what their Ideal Partner Profile is but they have not hard set of criteria that everyone adheres to. This causes some sales people to treat partners with a bit of skeptisism until they prove themselves. If your sales people knew the standards for your partners were solid, they would approach them much differently.

• Building a Channel Sales Team

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