Driving your 2018 company goals through your reseller program
If you work in SaaS, odds are you’ve spent significant time over the past 30 days discussing, drafting and re-drafting your company goals, metrics, hiring plan for 2018 — I know that we at TradeGecko definitely have.
And if you have a channel team or reseller program you’ve probably done a similar exercise with them —set targets for net new revenue, new resellers... the regular stuff.
However, this time around I urge you to try things a bit differently. This time think about how your resellers can help you drive your top goals for the year, and then incentivize them to do just that. Here’s how.
Goal: You want to improve cashflow and/or reduce churn
Having your customers paying for a year up-front is amazing. Not only does it help improve company cashflow, it also reduces the risk of churn for the first 12 months to zero.
Incentivize your partners to get their new (and existing) clients on an annual plan, either by giving them a one-time bonus for annual subscriptions or paying them their partner commission up-front when their customer pays annually.
Goal: You need to increase your gross margin
The SaaS gross margin benchmark is 80%. Anything below this will get your investors to raise questions about how you operate your post-sale team (and also hurt your runway).
Let’s say that your gross margin is dipping below where you’d ideally want it to be — it’s 60%. Maybe you have a complex product and spend a lot of time and money onboarding new customers and supporting them.
Why not start referring high touch point customers to your top resellers and cut down on all onboarding and Tier 1 support costs. Heck, you could even throw in a 10% rev share to your partners to help them make some money and still walk away grinning.
All of a sudden that 80% doesn’t seem so far away.
Get creative … and then communicate
These are just two ideas, and may not address even one or all of your 2018 goals. But you can still make it work. Here’s how you can break it down as a thought process:
- List down your company’s biggest goals for this calendar year.
- Write 2 ideas on how your resellers can help drive each goal and the incentive you can provide them.
- Reach out to your resellers and discuss your company’s 2018 goals, and the incentives that you’re rolling out for them. They will thank you for it, and you will too.
Oh, and the last step — cross your fingers and hope everything works out.
