The way businesses sell is evolving, and channel sales are becoming a dominant strategy in response to shifting buyer preferences. According to Forrester, nearly 70% of B2B buyers now purchase through an indirect route like a channel partner program rather than directly from the supplier. In response, 49% of B2B channel leaders plan to expand their channel sales programs to keep up with demand.

This shift is happening for a reason. Buyers today expect personalized experiences, trusted recommendations, and seamless purchasing journeys. Those are all things that channel partners, with their established customer relationships, can provide more effectively than direct sales teams alone. By leveraging third-party partners such as distributors, resellers, and value-added providers, businesses can expand into new markets, lower customer acquisition costs, and accelerate revenue growth.

“Nearly 70% of B2B buyers now purchase through an indirect route like a channel partner program rather than directly from the supplier.” — Forrester

But simply having a channel partner program doesn’t guarantee success. Only 20% of channel partners drive 80% of total channel sales, leaving the majority underperforming. Many companies struggle to keep their partners engaged, equipped with the right resources, and aligned with their brand messaging. Without a structured program, clear incentives, and the right technology to support partners, channel sales efforts can fall flat.

To maximize the effectiveness of a channel sales strategy, businesses must focus on strategic partnerships, robust enablement, and innovative technology solutions. In this blog, we’ll explore:

• What channel sales are and why they’re a powerful revenue driver
• The key benefits and challenges of working with channel partners
• Best practices for building a successful channel partner program
• The role of modern sales enablement technology in improving channel partner performance

By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap for optimizing your channel sales strategy to drive sustained growth and partner success.

What Is Channel Sales? Definition, Advantages & Challenges

Defining Channel Sales

Channel sales is a go-to-market strategy where a company sells its products or services through third-party partners—such as distributors, wholesalers, resellers, affiliates, or value-added providers—rather than selling directly to customers. Many businesses use a hybrid approach, combining direct and indirect sales models to maximize revenue opportunities.

A channel partner program formalizes these relationships, providing partners with structured incentives, training, and support to help them successfully sell and promote the company’s offerings. When executed well, this approach enables businesses to scale efficiently while leveraging their partners’ expertise, networks, and customer trust.

Advantages of Channel Sales

A well-structured channel sales strategy offers several key benefits:

✅ Expanded Market Reach: Partners help businesses break into new markets, industries, and regions without the need for a direct presence.

✅ Lower Customer Acquisition Costs: Leveraging partners reduces sales and marketing expenses, as they already have established relationships with their customers.

✅ Faster Sales Cycles: Partners act as trusted advisors to their customers, making it easier to influence purchasing decisions.

✅ Scalability: Instead of hiring and managing a large direct sales team, businesses can scale more efficiently by growing their partner network.

Challenges of Channel Sales

Despite its benefits, channel sales also present unique challenges:

🔴 Managing Partner Relationships: Keeping partners engaged, motivated, and aligned with your business goals requires consistent communication and support.

🔴 Ensuring Brand Consistency: Unlike direct sales, where you control the messaging, partners may not always represent your brand accurately. Training and enablement are key.

🔴 Driving Partner Productivity: Only 20% of partners contribute to 80% of channel sales, meaning many remain underutilized or inactive. Ensuring they have the right resources and motivation is critical.

🔴 Channel Conflict: When direct and indirect sales teams compete for the same customers, pricing and territory disputes can arise, causing friction.

To overcome these challenges, companies must build a structured channel partner program, implement strong enablement strategies, and leverage modern sales technology to support their partners effectively.

4 Steps for Building a Successful Channel Partner Program

A strong channel partner program is more than just a contract. It’s a structured framework that aligns, equips, and motivates partners to drive sales and grow your business. To maximize success, you need clear goals, effective onboarding, easy access to sales content, and compelling incentives. Here’s how to build a program that keeps partners engaged and productive.

1. Set Clear Objectives & Goals

What do you want to achieve with your channel partner program? Define measurable goals that align your business with your partners and provide a roadmap for success. These could include:

• Revenue targets to ensure sales contributions are on track.
• Market expansion goals to drive growth in new regions or industries.
• Customer acquisition benchmarks to measure success in reaching new buyers.

Setting clear goals creates alignment, accountability, and motivation. Partners know what’s expected, you can track progress with KPIs, and everyone stays focused on results.

2. Onboard Channel Partners for Success

Onboarding with your channel partners, just like with your internal sales team, isn’t just a one-time event. It’s the foundation of a productive, long-term partnership. Give new channel partners the tools, knowledge, and support they need to sell effectively. A successful onboarding process should:

• Introduce your brand, company values, and culture to strengthen alignment.
• Provide comprehensive product training to ensure partners understand features, benefits, and competitive differentiators.
• Offer ongoing education with webinars, workshops, and sales simulations to keep partners informed and confident.

Remember, many channel partners sell multiple products—including competitors’. The better you equip them, the more likely they are to prioritize your solutions.

3. Give Partners Easy Access to Sales Content

A sales content management system is a game-changer for channel sales. When partners have instant access to the right content, they can sell with confidence and respond quickly to customer needs.

Your sales content management system should enable partners to:

• Find up-to-date sales collateral, product updates, and battle cards anytime, anywhere.
• Access training materials, best practices, and sales tips on demand.
• Use AI-powered recommendations to get the most relevant content in the moment of need.

Important: Make your sales content management system mobile-friendly and searchable. Partners should be able to pull up a product sheet on their phone minutes before a sales call.

4. Motivate Channel Sales Partners with Incentives & Rewards

Channel sellers need compelling reasons to prioritize your products over competitors’. A strong incentive program keeps them engaged and drives performance.

• Offer competitive commissions, bonuses, and performance-based rewards.
• Make incentives easy to track with real-time dashboards and leaderboards.
• Recognize achievements—big and small—through public shoutouts, awards, and fun competitions.

Transparency is key. Partners should always know what they need to do to earn rewards and how close they are to reaching their next milestone.

By implementing these core components, you’ll create a channel sales program that attracts, enables, and retains high-performing partners. When partners feel supported and rewarded, they’ll sell more, stay engaged, and drive greater revenue for your business.

Key Strategies for Channel Partner Sales

Once you’ve built a structured channel partner program, the next step is optimizing partner engagement and performance. The right strategies ensure that partners stay informed, motivated, and equipped to sell effectively.

1. Maintain Open Communication

Strong relationships with channel partners don’t happen by chance—they require consistent, bidirectional communication. Keep partners engaged and informed through:

• Regular check-ins via meetings, calls, and video updates (weekly, monthly, or quarterly).
• Dedicated account managers to provide personalized support.
• Newsletters and partner portals with the latest product updates and sales tips.

This builds trust, fosters collaboration, and keeps partners aligned with your company’s objectives.

2. Provide Robust Marketing Support

Channel partners are an extension of your sales team. Equip them with the same high-quality marketing resources you provide your internal sellers:

• Co-branded marketing materials to enhance brand consistency.
• Personalized sales content like pitch decks, email templates, and call scripts.
• Interactive sales tools such as video messaging to engage prospects.

Make it easy for partners to market and sell your product, and they will be more effective in driving revenue.

3. Leverage Channel Sales Solutions

Technology plays a critical role in managing and enabling channel sales. A sales enablement platform streamlines content distribution, training, and communication, ensuring partners have what they need—when they need it.

With a robust sales enablement platform, channel partners can:

• Access training, resources, and onboarding materials on-demand from any device.
• Engage in interactive coaching and collaboration without disrupting productivity.
• Track their progress with dashboards and insights to stay motivated.

By combining effective communication, marketing support, and the right tools, businesses can maximize partner engagement and accelerate sales success.

Essential Tools to Maximize Channel Sales Performance

For your channel sales program to succeed, you must support and empower your partners at every stage. The right channel sales solutions give partners the tools, training, and insights they need to sell effectively. This leads to higher engagement, better alignment, and increased revenue.

Here’s how the right tools can transform your channel partner program.

1. CRM Integration: Automate & Optimize Partner Engagement

A CRM system integrated with your channel sales tools keeps partners informed and aligned. With CRM-powered automation, partners get:

• Content, training, and coaching recommendations tailored for each deal.
• Automated data capture and tracking for effortless reporting.
• Deal visualization tools to map out opportunities, track engagement, and optimize sales strategies.

Instead of partners scrambling to find relevant resources, CRM integration delivers what they need—exactly when they need it.

2. Sales Enablement Platform: Train, Coach & Measure Performance

A sales enablement platform brings training, coaching, and content management together in one place, helping partners sell smarter and faster. It enables you to:

• Track and assess training impact with engagement analytics.
• Monitor deal progression to see how enablement efforts affect real sales outcomes.
• Tie learning initiatives to revenue growth by connecting training completion with performance improvements.

When partners have on-demand training and sales guidance, they close deals more confidently and efficiently.

3. Analytics Dashboards: Real-Time Insights, Better Decisions

What’s working? What’s not? Real-time analytics dashboards give you the answers. With a comprehensive view of performance metrics, you can:

• Track win rates, deal sizes, and quota attainment at both the individual and program level.
• Compare pre- and post-training results to measure impact.
• Identify top-performing partners and replicate their success across your network.

With data-driven decision-making, you can refine strategies, improve training programs, and optimize partner engagement.

4. Content Management System: Deliver the Right Content at the Right Time

Partners need instant access to sales collateral, product updates, and messaging guidance—without digging through emails or outdated portals. A content management system ensures they can:

• Find relevant sales content on demand from any device.
• Get real-world usage insights to know when and how to use it effectively.
• Speed up the sales cycle by providing buyers with the right information at the right time.

A well-organized, searchable content management system eliminates friction and keeps partners selling, not searching.

Why Modern Channel Sales Solutions Matter

A powerful channel sales solution does more than track deals. It keeps partners engaged, informed, and selling at their best. Modern platforms also:

• Facilitate continuous communication through asynchronous video collaboration and personalized virtual launch training.
• Provide in-the-moment support with AI-powered content recommendations and coaching.
• Accelerate deal cycles with Digital Sales Rooms, where partners can easily share content, track engagement, and keep buyers engaged.

When partners are equipped with the right technology, they sell more effectively, stay motivated, and deliver better results for your business.

Top 3 Best Practices for Sustaining Channel Partner Relationships

Strong, long-term channel partnerships require trust, engagement, and clear alignment between your business and your partners. By implementing these best practices, you can strengthen relationships and drive mutual success.

Foster Trust & Collaboration

Trust is the foundation of any successful partnership. Open, consistent communication helps build that trust and keeps partners aligned with your business. To foster collaboration:

• Set shared goals so partners understand expectations and feel invested in success.
• Actively listen to partner needs and provide solutions that help them succeed.
• Offer robust training and onboarding so they feel confident selling your products.
• Leverage channel sales enablement tools for easy access to content, coaching, and deal insights.
• Recognize and reward performance to keep partners motivated and engaged.

When partners feel valued and supported, they are more likely to stay committed, prioritize your products, and drive stronger sales outcomes.

Drive Partner Engagement

Engaged partners sell more. But engagement takes work. It requires consistent interaction, valuable resources, and ongoing support.

• Stay connected through regular meetings, newsletters, and video updates. Keeping an open dialogue builds relationships, reinforces trust, and ensures alignment.
• Equip partners with top-tier marketing support, such as co-branded materials, co-marketing initiatives, and personalized sales content. When partners have the right tools, they can reach and convert more prospects effectively.
• Streamline access to critical resources with on-the-go training, AI-driven content recommendations, and self-service sales enablement platforms. This removes friction, keeps partners informed, and improves efficiency.

Providing consistent support makes it easier for partners to focus on selling rather than searching for resources.

Avoid Channel Conflict

Even well-structured partner programs face challenges. The most common issue? Channel conflict. To minimize friction and ensure alignment between direct and channel sales efforts:

• Clearly define which products go through the channel versus direct sales to prevent competition.
• Develop systems to manage partner competition, ensuring fair distribution of leads and territories.
• Communicate the value of your distribution model, so both internal teams and partners understand their roles and benefits.

By proactively addressing these issues, you create a win-win environment where partners feel supported rather than sidelined.

Driving Success in Channel Sales

Companies that invest in strong channel partner programs will gain a competitive edge. Success starts with clear objectives, effective training, and the right technology to empower partners. When your wholesalers or distributors have the tools and support they need, they become high-performing extensions of your sales team.

Technology is the backbone of a strong channel sales strategy. It streamlines workflows, enhances content delivery, and provides real-time performance insights. But tools alone won’t drive success. Strong relationships, open communication, and a culture of collaboration are just as important. When partners feel valued and motivated, they sell more. And when they sell more, everyone wins.

By focusing on enablement, engagement, and technology, businesses can unlock new revenue streams, expand their market reach, and build lasting partnerships.

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Boost Your Channel Sales Strategy

Put your resellers, distributors, and affiliate partners to work for you. Learn how to create a channel partner enablement program that ensures they receive the skills, knowledge, and content to engage buyers and win deals. Download the Playbook.