Building material manufacturers that are seeking to expand often run into a big problem: getting persuasive brand materials into the hands of the people who are driving sales. Those include not only sales staff, but channel partners like local dealers, distributors, and contractors as well.
Why is this such an issue?
When local dealers and contractors on the ground don’t have materials like brochures, flyers, use cases, and other key marketing and sales collateral, they won’t be able to “sell” on your behalf. That leaves a gap for your competitors to step into.
The solution: channel partner enablement, which entails an organized effort to get persuasive sales collateral to local pros and dealers. Doing this will empower those partners to transfer their confidence in your products to end consumers, resulting in higher sales and more brand exposure.
Here, we’ll further describe the impact of channel enablement for a building materials manufacturer, and the kind of modern solution that will make it all work.
Enable Dealers So They Can Highlight Your Products Over the Competition
Your dealers are focused on one thing, day in and day out: making their cash registers ring.
Through channel enablement, you can step into that process and help ensure that your products are going into customer shopping carts. Since brick-and-mortar retail stores have a lot of building materials on the shelf, including your competitors’ versions of what you have to offer, the trick is making sure your products are the ones standing out as the obvious choice.
This can happen when you furnish dealers with information on the key benefits and differentiators of your brand through sell sheets, brochures, and detailed product guides.
Be sure to explain the value of your products’ features to dealers before handing over the materials. This way, your dealers will be able to speak more authoritatively on your products, and may even prefer to highlight yours over others. You’ll be giving them reasons to be enthusiastic about highlighting your products, while ultimately helping them make more sales.
Another thing to consider is that some consumers are more discerning. According to data from Retail Dive, up to 62% of shoppers rate the ability to see, feel and try out items as the #1 reason they shop in brick-and-mortar stores instead of online.
By helping dealers with thoughtful partner enablement materials, you can help them craft a high-touch customer experience with your products — and give them the ability to answer more questions, with finer detail and higher accuracy.
This ensures your products get into the hands of contractors and consumers who will appreciate them the most.
Enable Contractors So They Can Defend Their Trust In Your Brand
Contractors occupy a unique space in your business ecosystem. They’re the ones who have ongoing face-to-face contact with consumers, who in turn end up using your products in their homes and offices.
Those consumers will be searching online for services they need, but they’re often flying blind. Most home services consumers don’t have a company in mind when they conduct online searches, according to a survey by LSA.
For those reasons, you’ll really want your contractors to be a second-line salesforce for your brand. By sharing sales materials and product differentiators as part of channel enablement, you’ll help boost the local profile of preferred contractors, while helping them promote your brand more powerfully in customer interactions.
Contractors also have to be fully confident in the products they use to do their jobs at the highest level. Provide product specs, safety, and training info and you’ll complete the picture for them, keeping them “captive” as your professional customers and brand evangelists.
When you give installers and builders key product information (after going above and beyond to ensure they understand your products better than others), you’ll start to create loyalty around your brand. You’ll increase the chances of those local pros seeking out, using, and recommending your products.
From there, the channel enablement effects continue downstream. Contractors will naturally begin to share the enthusiasm with end consumers…and when homeowners, business owners, and other contractor clients start to believe in your brand, that’s what they’ll ask for again and again.
This can give your brand a big boost wherever it has a presence.
The Right Solution for Channel Partner Enablement, and Why It Matters
Having a great channel enablement program means providing your dealers and contractors with the info they need from you, when they need it. However, most enterprise building material manufacturers will find it hard to do this without a specialized tech solution.
Why? There are several reasons.
For one, relying on files stored on a hard drive or file server is a setup for failure. Often, files stored in this way are very disorganized, making retrieval time-consuming and inefficient, whether it’s your sales staff that’s tasked with sharing documents, or channel partners themselves that you’ve given access to.
In addition, dealers and contractors will need access to these materials on demand, often from mobile devices. You’ll also want to ensure they have only the most relevant, up-to-date documents and tools, which is often impossible for an enterprise sales staff to manage across multiple territories and customize for different local needs.
The outcome: a messy document-sharing process that fails to meet the true definition of channel partner enablement, or achieve the stronger competitive advantage and higher marketing ROI it promises.
The remedy is marketing asset management (MAM). A high-quality MAM solution can organize, track, and distribute the right materials to the right people, through a secure digital portal, on any device.
The best possible tool for this is RevBase, a software resource that was recently acquired by Bullseye Locations.
RevBase is a revolutionary SaaS solution that keeps all your marketing assets — whether digital or print-on-demand — in one place, online. You can give password-protected, secure access to only the people who need it, including your trusted channel partners.
That means the local dealers and contractors your brand depends on can simply log on and download the right collateral at any time, whether they’re in the office or out in the field. You’ll even be able to track which materials are downloaded and when, and announce changes via tailored email campaigns.
With a solution like this, your channel partners on the ground will be more equipped to sell your products, while growing an affinity for your brand as you actively help build their businesses.
As a building material manufacturer looking to scale and gain a competitive edge, it’s time to work smarter, not harder, with today’s technology. If you’re using Bullseye’s locator technology, you’re already ahead of the game. A Bullseye-powered dealer or contractor locator will help you route leads to your channel partners more efficiently and in a trackable way.
Combine that with the power of RevBase, and you can finally enable those same local partners with the product info they need to be an effective secondary “salesforce” for your brand.
Building a Channel Partner Enablement Program? Serve Your Dealers and Contractors with the Best Solution
You might have a good relationship with some of the dealers and contractors who faithfully use your brand’s products. However, are you keeping that bond strong?
It could be crucial to retaining them as your “first” customers and getting your brand into more end consumers’ minds as the one to trust.
That’s why it’s crucial to take channel enablement seriously. It’s about strengthening key business relationships in ways that build exposure and goodwill for your brand.
However, it can’t be done in a half-hearted or disorganized way. According to a survey by SDL (now RDS), 90% of customers expect a consistent brand experience across all channels. This naturally includes channel partners, who must be able to represent your brand in a consistent, positive way.
That’s where RevBase comes in. This new tool from Bullseye Locations will help you track and distribute sales materials, along with training, product data, brochures, price lists, and other key documents, with more precision than ever before.
By creating this secure portal for sharing the best of your brand with your local business partners, you’ll lay the foundation for an unstoppable local messaging mechanism that results in a three-dimensional win…for your building materials brand, your dealers and contractors, and the end consumers of your products.
To learn how RevBase can supercharge your channel partner enablement process, contact RevBase today.