Sales coaching can be the differentiator between average and excellent sales. Learn how you can grow your channel partnerships by leveraging sales coaching.

A good sales rep can sell anything. But to sell consistently and for the long term, even the best salespeople need continual training. It’s especially useful for your channel partners who need extra support to bring in sales. They must understand your product, brand values, and unique selling points. So, how do you design an effective sales coaching strategy?

Look no further. We’ve compiled the ultimate guide to help your partners close more deals than ever.

5 Tips To Supercharge Your Channel Partnerships & Win More Biz with Sales Coaching

Your priority should be to build trust with your new sales channel partner. However, it can be chaotic to onboard multiple vendors simultaneously. But with the proper sales training tools, you can supercharge channel partnerships. Here are our top 5 tips for nurturing their sales success:

1. Solid Training and Onboarding

A channel partner must understand your company's culture, products, and services. This gives them all the knowledge they need to start selling your product. However, getting familiar with your brand can be a massive learning curve for your partners. They may be great at sales but will still need additional training to understand your goals and targets. When constructing an effective sales coaching program, you need to set the following parameters:

Identify Primary Goals

Your channel partner needs to understand clearly what your goals are. Do you want to increase your sales? Are you looking to increase engagement from all parties? Are you trying to reduce costs and decrease turnover? You can assign KPIs to your goals, making progress tracking easier for you and your partners. This way, you can establish clear expectations on sales targets, performance metrics, and reporting requirements.

Develop a Comprehensive Onboarding Program

Channel partner onboarding is essential because it lets them experience your brand and understand key information. This helps them formulate a successful strategy that will ultimately translate into more sales. The program should include a welcome package, an introduction to the company's history, organizational structure, product and service training, sales techniques, and market positioning.

If your onboarding is not done correctly, it may confuse your partners. On the other hand, proper onboarding gives your channel partners a solid foundation to work. This improves sales and promote long-term partnerships.

Provide Regular Training

Continuous training ensures that your channel partners are up-to-date with the latest products, updates, and offers. You can offer online training, webinars, or training modules. You should also have a dedicated account manager as a point of contact for any questions, concerns, or issues your partner may have.

2. Immersive Experiences and Innovation

Your channel partners determine the success of your business, which is why you should involve them in the testing of your products from the start. They need immersive experiences to understand your products.

Create a hands-on virtual learning experience for your product and your brand vision. Your partners must understand your brand, your target customer personas, and their pain points. This can be done in several innovative ways, such as using VR or AR technology.

Also, it's a great idea to invest in a learning management system (LMS) that supports learning on the go. Your partners can access it anytime from anywhere. Sales coaching is a continuous process, and an LMS can be a beneficial tool to customize and disseminate your training material.

3. Develop Co-Branded Templates & Assets

Develop a messaging strategy communicating your brand's value proposition and USP (unique selling proposition). The strategy should be comprehensive and include messaging for all sales cycle stages, from awareness to conversion. This prevents your partners from becoming bogged down in any sale aspect.

Also, it is important to create branded content as it ensures that all your partners create consistent messaging and imagery that aligns with your strategy. You can make white papers, surveys, case studies, infographics, eBooks, and videos. Once the sales team has all these templates and resources to work with, their creativity will be limitless.

Co-brand and Co-create Marketing Materials

Co-branded marketing materials establish credibility, which helps your resellers and partners nurture warm leads. You should also leverage your partners’ expertise and work closely with them to find out what additional marketing support they may need. This can include:

• Email templates: Email marketing remains the undisputed leader in generating sales and closing more deals. Craft emails for different sales process stages to keep the messaging consistent.
• Sales funnels: Your partners may need materials, such as ad creatives and copies, depending on where they advertise your product. You must also work closely with them to test and develop a high-converting landing page.
• Social media templates: A whopping 90% of marketers believe social media to be indispensable to their business. Social media templates will help your sales team organically promote your product or service and engage with customers directly.

4. Points, Leaderboards, and Rewards

Sales don’t have to be boring. You can gamify the process. Whether you are looking to increase sales of a particular product, motivate your team, or generate buzz around a new launch, there are several ways to gamify the system.

A healthy competition will improve your channel partners’ performances. Choose a competition format that aligns with your goals and engages your sales team. This could include a leaderboard that tracks sales performance, a team-based competition, or instant prize games. The buzz and excitement will boost your sales team.

A leaderboard featuring top sales partners will make everyone compete for the top spot. It’s human nature to seek validation. Leaderboards and prizes for winners will motivate your team a lot. You can also incorporate gamification elements, such as badges and prizes like gift cards, experiences, or recognition.

A fun and engaging sales competition will increase participation and generate more revenue. This is also a great way to showcase your brand values and corporate culture to your partners.

5. Leverage Virtual Technology

Nowadays, businesses that adopt new technology and relentlessly adapt to changes can stay ahead of their competitors. Automating several parts of the sales process and utilizing the likes of VR, AR, and artificial intelligence allows you to create immersive virtual experiences that will improve and analyze channel partner performance. Technology is a vast sales enabler. It allows the sales team to experience your brand better, and you can also find their pain points easily and optimize them.

Enhance Virtual Selling Skills

Your sales coaching should include virtual selling. In this post-pandemic world, where many employees work remotely and customers prefer to shop online, there is a high chance that your channel partners are meeting customers online.

Coach your team on how to give demos online and interact via virtual channels. Virtual call coaching is also vital because calls deliver sales pitches differently than face-to-face ones.

Supercharge Your Channel Partnerships Today

Immersive technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality have forever changed the business landscape. With Xureal, you can leverage the power of modern tech to increase your sales teams’ skills and performance.

Our all-in-one cloud solution will help you train high-performing teams. We’ll make your sales coaching interactive, engaging, and productive. You’ll be able to track your teams’ training progress and identify learning gaps in real time. Our captivating and immersive virtual experiences will help your partners experience your brand firsthand, no matter where they’re based.

It’s time to power your sales enablement strategies with modern tech. Get in touch and request a demo today!