Developing your channel strategy and partnerships is not about you. You can’t design a successful ecosystem around the needs of only one party. Instead, you need to embrace a philosophy of asking what you can do for others — for your partners and, ultimately, for the customers you both serve.

This is a philosophy that you need to adopt across your entire organization, top to bottom and across all functions.

So what are the three characteristics to building a successful channels sales and marketing team?

1) They’re Cross-Functional

Though a channel program may start out small, perhaps as an extension of your sales operation, it’s best to take a cross-functional approach from the start. This is the only way to ensure not only program survival, but also scalability. 

Speaking frankly about the initial development of the channel team for Optimizely, Dan Glazer says, “At first, we overlooked the fact that channel affects every part of the organization. We started out working solely with sales, but soon realized that we needed to involve finance, marketing, and even our product team.” As Glazer points out, channel touches every aspects of your business, even to the point of influencing product development based on channel partner feedback on features and usability.

Based on his experience, Glazer recommends meeting with the various functional leaders within your organization as part of your due diligence. “You need to have the resource conversation up front,” he says. One way to approach this is to quantify the percentage of revenue you expect to generate via the channel and then use that figure to help resource owners understand your need to tap into their tech/training/marketing/etc. personnel and other assets. “It’s the difference between night and day when you have connections and support within those cross-functional teams,” Glazer says.

Once you’ve established those contacts, Glazer recommends showing them how channel can help solve their problems, “You need to figure out the ways in which each cross-functional team can win with channel,” he says. “The executive teams mostly get it, but the extended teams may need further education.”

In his business development role at Pantheon, Halid Ibrahimovic considers himself an internal advocate for channel, “I work closely with partner marketing, product, support, and our direct sales team to make sure we’re strategically aligned over the next quarter in terms of campaigns we’re going to launch and any other details.” In this way, Ibrahimovic ensures that all the functional leads are kept in the loop on what’s happening with channel, so there are no developmental surprises or unexpected resource demands.

Bottom Line: Understand that what you do with the channel has far-reaching implications that will affect all the teams within your organization. Don’t keep them in the dark. Give them the opportunity to engage early and help you build a channel program that has cross-functional support.

2) They Have Company-Wide Buy-in and Support

Given the typical resource constraints of expansion-stage SaaS companies, the efforts to develop a channel program tend to come in fits and starts. Without a comprehensive strategy and systematic approach that delivers company-wide visibility, you will find it difficult to garner the support you need to build and maintain a successful channel program.

“Organizationally, the head of channel should report to the CEO or be on an executive committee,” says Peter Caputa. “This level of access and influence is important because every decision company leadership makes will impact the partners.” Caputa also advocates for having a channel representative involved in annual planning, “In terms of growth, the important channel considerations aren’t necessarily intuitive for people not directly involved in that aspect of the business. 

Dan Glazer agrees that it’s important to engage each team within the context of the whole organization. “Each team has its own initiatives,” he explains, “But even though they work towards it in different ways, they are all aligned with one company goal.”

Bottom Line: As much as is possible, you want to have company-wide top-down and bottom-up support for your efforts. You want everyone in your organization thinking about the channel as much as they think about direct sales.

3) They Are Somewhat Specialized

Although you don’t need to engage a specialized team right out of the gate, there are a few mindset and tactical considerations to bear in mind when putting your channel team together.

For example, David Skok warns against expecting that your inside sales reps will transition easily to channel sales. “There’s a different mindset involved in committing to the long-term effort of building a channel,” he explains. “Sales people used to direct sales prefer more control and the faster results that come from doing things directly with the customer.” In contrast, channel sales people know that their patience will be rewarded. “They know that the channel will help them get greater leverage than doing things themselves.” 

In addition to sales reps, Skok is adamant that the head of sales should be very committed to the channel program. “You need a leader who is willing to see the program through the bumpy phases of the early days,” he says. “For example, you may hand off a lead to a channel partner, and they might bungle it. Sticking with it through those rough patches requires someone who has seen the model work before and is willing to commit to the long-term vision.” With your head of sales bought into the channel, you can rely on their leadership skills to manage the rest of the sales organization and provide the appropriate training.

Firas Raouf points out that you may also need to specialize a little based on the unique nature of  your business and your partners. For instance, in his work with a SaaS company that sells marketing tools, he deals with a range of partner types — some use the software internally while others manage the software on behalf of their clients to a varying degree of detail. For this type of situation, Raouf recommends assigning support based on the partner role (marketing, sales, services, etc.). “Each situation varies,” he says, “But by honing in on the type or partner, you can more easily determine who within the SaaS company should own the relationship.” 

Bottom Line: While you don’t need to insist that every member of your channel team be solely dedicated to channel, it is a good idea to make sure they are fully versed in and committed to your channel philosophy.