Optimizing Customer Engagement with an Effective Channel Strategy

An effective channel strategy can open new markets (geographical, vertical, etc.) previously unavailable to your company, facilitate existing market growth, and provide the opportunity to reach target audiences or segments where and how they prefer to do business.

It is critical to understand how your partners' strategic goals align with your own, who their target audiences are, how they serve these markets, where they fit in your channel ecosystem, and how they will help you as a vendor to sustain the customer relationship throughout the buying process.

Buy-in from all actors involved within your company’s value chain is required to achieve customer success.

Work with the channel partners to leverage their knowledge of the target audience to acquire the appropriate level of information on their needs and buying process. Using this acquired knowledge to identify pain points and business opportunities, and map out their customer journey.

Just as their consumers counterparts, B2B customers have come to expect a more efficient, engaging, and personalized customer experience. Every interaction with customers is an opportunity to create connections with them and raise their engagement level towards your brand and products or services. Gaining a proper understanding of their needs and then delivering a personalized, contextual and relevant cross-channel experience will go a long way toward building the trust necessary to convert potential buyers into loyal customers.

When creating a personalized and seamless experience for channel partners, you empower them with the tools they need to successfully complement your efforts in providing a consistent experience throughout the customer journey, improve their end of the customer lifecycle management and eliminate friction points preventing them from meeting your customers’ needs.

You need to provide channel partners with the necessary context, collateral, and product or service details, enabling them to support customers in a personalized and engaging manner when interacting with them.

Open communication between partners is key in understanding the customer journey’s context, providing a cohesive experience, and obtaining customers’ trust.