Channel resellers are typically strong in a particular domain expertise. They possess industry, some application and perhaps geographic market knowledge. Hopefully, they also have selling acumen.

Like many companies, channel resellers are typically weak in the area of marketing — especially lead generation and sales enablement support. This puts an added burden on limited sales resources, lowers sales results, and raises selling costs beyond what they should be.

In fact, one expectation resellers have of their source vendor is the opportunity to draft off the vendor’s brand, marketing programs and channel support resources to supplement their marketing weaknesses.

Herein lies a major disconnect.

Vendors do have marketing expertise, content, resources and funding. Their subject experts, and those they can easily recruit, are great sources for lead gen programs and content: whitepapers, topic briefs, webinars and videos for example. They regularly build sales training and customer engagement tools for their direct sales people.

In fact, vendors are loaded with content — vendor branded content. What if …

… resellers could receive re-purposed and co-branded versions of that content?

… training, marketing and selling tools could be easily integrated to deliver more of a reseller story –  “powered by vendor X” — but containing the resellers perspective and knowledge as well as the source vendor?

… vendor marketing programs could easily be leveraged as reseller programs — delivered from the reseller’s website, to reseller lists, yielding “leads” (contacts) for the reseller, and more active inbound activity due to improved content marketing practices?

Vendors are beginning to adopt the publishing approach of syndicating their content. They re-deploy, often with re-purposed content, directly into reseller websites through a centrally managed content management system.

Each reseller receives relevant, regularly updated content from the vendor, in a co-branded page on their website, often intermixed with reseller specific content. Calls to action and registration forms are reseller specific and return lead/contact information directly to resellers.

To learn more about the service that deploys this application, click here.

Also, check out “Who’s Going to Stock the Pond?” (30 second streaming video).