Expertise
Why consider a channel portal? Simply because there are few better ways to a build a long-term relationship with your best customers – the vendors, distributors, resellers, installers or service providers you do business with on a regular basis.
A multi-lingual reseller and distributor portal provides a go-to destination for educating and supporting your channel partners across the globe. Or you can scale down and simply create a more intimate, VIP-feel for high-worth partnerships you need to nurture carefully.
A portal provides a truly symbiotic relationship with your most important allies. From reward schemes, crucial training and certification, to simply keeping partners up to speed with what’s happening in their world, a well-designed channel portal is a doorway to loyal and long-lasting partnerships.
But remember, a partner portal is not a website. It doesn’t need to match the look and feel of your public-facing site. It’s not about converting prospects into leads. It’s about creating an intuitive, familiar and consistent platform to help your partners make more sales.
“ I am delighted! Once again, Torpedo have exceeded my expectations in delivering a site that not only meets its objective but actually makes the experience interactive. ”
When building anything in life, never scrimp on materials. In other words, invest time and budget into channel content that is useful and valuable. At Torpedo, our approach to channel portals always begins with the same question – why would your partners want to spend any time there? What’s in it for them?
We’ll need to get to grips with the way your distributors, installers, customers (or whoever), think. And that can mean taking into account cultural differences too.
Content is king, but we can also help you decide on the right mix of information, versus education. Product news versus sales promotion. We can also help you to plan the way the portal functions on a mobile device.
Which brings us to the most important channel portal ingredient. Navigation.
At Torpedo, we’re sticklers for simple, effortless navigation. Your partners’ time is as precious as yours, so let’s make sure they can get to the content they want as fast as possible. They may just want to know a few simple facts, but if it takes them 10 minutes to find them buried in a blog, they won’t be back. Meanwhile, you’ll be wrongly congratulating yourself on the extra dwell time.
Then again, don’t get hung up on the number of clicks and visits, or amount of minutes spent on the site (you wouldn’t measure store sales by the amount of people that browse around the shop). But you can and should track how many training options were taken up, how many promotional packages were used, and so on – to give you a clear picture of how effectively your budget is being spent on this powerful marketing tool.
Talk to Torpedo and we can work with you to conceive the promos, script-write and shoot the tutorials and edit the content you’re keen to provide.
And, most important of all, help you give your partners a reason to go to you.