Is Your Startup Ready for a Reseller Program?

Summary

Most startups fall into the trap of starting a reseller program without making sure they're set up to succeed. Building a great program involves having a solid value proposition, making sure that your product is ready for partners, and buy in from management to help you scale.

Side note: I wrote this in 2016 and originally published it on my Medium. I've made some minor updates to bring the post up to speed.

Here's what we cover

Introduction

Having a robust reseller program is a dream for any SaaS business. Who wouldn’t want teams of sales and support reps around the world carrying their brand and helping them to acquire and support new customers? Better yet, they’re not even on your payroll — which does wonders for your cost to acquire and cost to support customers.

But building a reseller program is hard work. Just because you’ve received some inbound interest from people wanting to carry your product that doesn’t mean your reseller program is going to be a hit. In fact building a great reseller program requires more than just the ‘great’ product you have right now. It requires a lot of thought, careful execution, money, and time… a lot of time. So much so that it may just make more sense for you to ignore resellers and focus 100% of your time on optimising your direct funnel.

Maybe you’re already working on this and you’re seeing some traction when running your reseller program experiment, so you’re thinking of turning on the growth accelerator. At this point in time, you have to start asking yourself the following three questions:

What’s your value proposition to resellers?

When building a reseller program, it’s imperative to have a strategy in order to acquire resellers. After all, you have competitors in the market that your resellers could easily work with. So why should they choose to bet their company on you?

For a start, you need to build your value proposition around the problems your resellers face. They need to:

• Market themselves
• Consult and sell to prospective clients
• Implement solutions
• Support their customer base

Which of these jobs can you alleviate for them? A good reseller program would help to relieve pain points at every level of the reseller’s funnel, focusing on marketing and sales as these tend to be the biggest challenge for their reseller base.

Look at the reseller programs of market leaders and your competitors, but most importantly look at your own product and how it can help solve your resellers challenges.

Do you have a solid product and support?

If you don’t have a solid answer to this, a reseller program might be the least of your problems. While the definition of ‘solid product and support’ may be subjective, a reseller program does not work if your product has considerable gaps, breaks often, or if you have poor customer support.

You need to understand that a reseller’s relationship with their clients is built upon trust. While this benefits you because their customers are less likely to churn, it also means that there are only so many times you can let your reseller partners down as this affects the trust they’ve built with their client. If they continue to face poor support or product breakdowns, they will consider bringing their next customer elsewhere.

Having a reseller churn is far worse than a single customer churning. Consider offering your resellers a priority support level agreement in your value proposition if you can afford to and making this part of your program.

How much buy-in does the program have from management?

When it’s time to pull the trigger and scale your reseller program you will need your entire company’s support.

You’ll need help from marketing to help promote the program, sales to organise the reseller funnel, work with support/success for special reseller support workflows, and product to help you with the infrastructure. That’s a lot of people and meetings — and without your management’s buy in it will be difficult getting people away from the quarterly targets and help you get your reseller project off the ground.

But that’s not all.

Having a budget does wonders for your program. The best reseller relationships are often those you’ve met in person. The ROI for ecosystem events you head down for to recruit resellers can be incredible. Or help your resellers organise events at tech events, trade shows, or roadshows so that they can recruit more leads for themselves and your business.

What comes next?

Once you’re sure that you have these 3 things under your belt, you’re ahead of most of the competition. You should now be spending your time building out the basics of your program and talking to a whole lot of potential resellers.

As you understand their problems better, you’ll figure out if your value proposition actually works. Iterate, acquire more resellers, help your resellers grow and you should start seeing a steady, growing revenue channel… but of course it’s always a bit harder than that.

Thanks for reading this far. If you have questions or are curious to learn more, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. 👋

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