Your target customers are already buying technology.
And in many cases, they’re buying it from resellers and agents they already know and trust.
Those partners have spent years building relationships with their customers. They may already have established credit lines, procurement processes, service agreements, technical relationships, and regular meetings with the people your sales team is trying to reach.
Meanwhile, your direct sales team may be knocking on doors, working LinkedIn, attending events, and networking to find the right contact.
There’s nothing wrong with direct prospecting. Every company should maintain direct relationships with its most important customers.
But there’s another question worth asking:
What if you shifted some of your prospecting resources from finding individual customers to finding the partners who already serve those customers?
Prospect the Partner
A strong reseller or agent may have relationships with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of potential customers.
Instead of starting every customer relationship from zero, an indirect sales strategy gives you the opportunity to work through organizations that already have access, credibility, and commercial relationships with the companies you want to reach.
The challenge is finding and activating the right partners.
That’s where national distributors and Technology Services Distributors (TSDs) can become powerful resources.
Use the Networks That Already Exist
National technology distributors already support large ecosystems of resellers, VARs, integrators, MSPs, and other technology partners.
TSDs play a similar role within the technology agent and advisory community, connecting suppliers with large networks of agents and technology advisors.
For a technology company trying to expand its reach, these organizations can provide something extremely difficult to build independently:
Access to an existing partner ecosystem.
The right distribution relationship can give you a platform to introduce your products, educate partners, create incentives, generate awareness, and recruit resellers and agents whose customers fit your target profile.
You don't need every partner in the network.
You need the right ones.
Change Who You're Prospecting
This doesn't mean abandoning direct sales.
It means recognizing that your next great customer relationship may begin with a partner relationship.
Your salespeople can spend another day trying to get a meeting with a target account.
Or your channel team can build relationships with the resellers and agents who are already meeting with those accounts every day.
Sometimes the fastest path to the customer isn't prospecting the customer. It's prospecting the partner who already has them.