How to enable resellers to maximise sales in a "Land and Expand" sales model

Organisationally, the resellers would have to match the potential volume. The organisation needed to support Software and Services are different that resellers of SaaS. With a target of 250k annually in volume, would only leave room for a few employees, depending on where you are in the world, so I would think that the head count of resellers would be high. But I would consider one of the following, when approaching your question "How best could an organisation support resellers to reach their targets (min 250k annually) with such small margins?": 1. "Land and Expand" is apparently not a unified approach. See this link about strategy - think about product strategy first. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/land-expand-sales-strategy-mike-pilcher 2. Make it easy for the resellers. Have some infrastructure ready, f.eks. Suggested templates for website design, scripts for calling, marketing material, etc. Make it as easy as possible for them to execute. 3. This also goes for monitoring how the sales are going, which would also be of your interest. Build something unified in salesforce.com or develop your own platform. Build in benchmarking of the resellers - either for an overview for you, or for informing them how they are doing compared to their peers. Noting motivates sales people as knowing their position compared to others. 4. Build a feedback loop to you - have the resellers feed back, what works and what doesn't in the dialogue, and change the material accordingly. 5. You could also build a lead generation infrastructure somewhere, where costs are lower, if a generic sales approach to your product would work. This could be an offshore callcenter, or lead generation from your website. That also depends on whether the resellers should visit the customers physically or not. But anything to avoid the resellers to cold call - that destroys their motivation. 6. Create a sense of community among the resellers, and do anything to keep motivation up. Help them share best practise across the resellers, give them new products or sales approaches to work with. Give prizes to those, who share best practise. 7. Give them a portfolio commission. That would signal that you trust them and you want to partner with them in the long haul. They could also take part in portfolio maintenance work down the road, if they get customer "ownership" - f.ex. Through service visits, retention calls or similar activities. You could also consider giving them all customer facing contact, so you don't have any direct contact with anybody other than the resellers. That may be a little risky, but it would signal, that you trust them, and want to share your success with them. 8. Develop added services, that are integrated with the end customers usage of your product. So your SaaS would only be part of what the reseller was offering to the client. This could be information products about your software, best practice, consulting opportunities or similar. Anything, that can make your value proposition to the reseller more attractive. This was some of the characteristics, that I have thought of with regards to making it attractive for the resellers to work for you. Feel free to schedule a call, where we can discuss the ideas, and develop some more, so you create an approach, that will be successful. Good luck with your distribution. Best regards Kenneth Wolstrup

I've been a commercial real estate broker for 5 years now and have ventured into a handful of business partnerships - some have worked and some have nearly ruined me. What I find, on a surface level, is that you must absolutely share the same VALUES and MISSION as your potential partner. Having even stake in the game also helps, as it avoids one partner eventually grabbing "the upper hand". If you are not bringing cash or equity to the table, be prepared to demonstrate how your hard work can be translated into $ value. If you have more detailed scenarios or questions, feel free to bounce them off me at anytime. Cheers! -S.

Hi, I've helped people buy and sell businesses for years and have helped people dissolve and create partnerships and raise capital. When you take on a partner, you're selling a piece of a business. Either the one you have now or the one you hope to grow into. The question is, 'what do you expect your new partner to bring to the business and what will they need to get in order to justify the risks?' People use the word 'partner' to talk about real partners, shareholders, investors, etc. You can structure debt arrangements, equity arrangements or combinations depending on what you want to achieve and based on what inticements you think you need to offer. Give me a call to discuss the specifics of your situation and be sure to check out my reviews to see how I've helped other people with partner issues. Thanks Dave

I very much disagree with Mark's assessment. You shouldn't compensate this person for the COO role until they are confirmed into this role and working full-time in this capacity. If they are a part time medical advisor, they should have a very small amount of equity to begin with. It would depend mostly on how much (if any) you've raised to date, but it would be unusual for an advisor to have more than 1% of the Company. Happy to talk to you about the details of your situation to come up with a fair offer that doesn't hurt your chances of raising capital in the future.

Market to your niche, talking about the same problems your beta clients signed on to get fixed. These are called "pain points" and are valuable language. Anyone in the situation will instantly pay attention to you. Note that I am saying you should talk about the problem(s), not the features of your software. People want to get out of bad situations, not buy features. Yes, retain equity. Once given away, it's difficult to recover. And it can easily be worth much more than the capital raised...which is meant for operating expenses anyway, not your personal use. If the beta clients have paid you for their involvement, then it would seem you've proven the economic viability of the solution. Either way, your next job is to filter for people having the same problem the software solved for your beta clients, and get new clients to pay for the solution.