Learning is a lot like being hermit crab. Each shell that you move into comes with certain limitations. And as you learn and grow, you will eventually need to move out of your small, stifling shell.

Summary

Learning is a lot like being hermit crab. Each shell that you move into comes with certain limitations. And as you learn and grow, you will eventually need to move out of your small, stifling shell.

Good learning discipline is an essential part of growth. This comes from two habits done in tandem: doing and learning. As you do and learn, be prepared for an upwards growth spiral as you migrate from old shells to new.

Introduction

I recently caught the writing bug (long story) and had a simple goal: writing content that helps me crystallise my growth marketing thoughts.

I had “written” before, primarily for work. But I didn’t write often. So I needed to learn. I needed to learn how to write better, quickly.

Enter The Hermit Crab

The hermit crab is a great metaphor for learning that I came across in Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning (Amazon Link). I’ve taken his concept and gone a bit nuts with it 😂

See, if you’re not aware, hermit crabs use abandoned sea-shells as their homes. When a crab outgrows its shell it’s forced to find a new one that fits it better.

Similarly, as you grow in your learning journey you will need to find bigger shells to fit into. And, no, don’t jump into a shell 3 sizes larger; it’s better to work your way up a size at a time.

Finally, the dreaded part-you’ll have to expose your soft, vulnerable insides to the world when you jump from your old shell to a bigger one! Who said learning was easy?

Developing Good Learning Discipline

I break down learning into two habits: doing and learning. They work best together, and otherwise fall apart.

• Doing without putting time aside to learn leads to stagnation.
• Learning without doing leaves you short on any practical skills.

Good learning discipline also involves knowing the following:

• When is it time to start learning? (vs. continuing doing)
• What learning subjects to prioritise? (because you can’t learn everything)
• When to stop learning? (and go back to doing)

The Upwards Spiral of Learning

When you’re learning something new you start with a small shell. Your frameworks will be rudimentary, not unlike your shell.

As you do and learn your understanding of the world evolves, and you become aware of the limitations of your “shell”.

This is when you should deep-dive into learning. Work on your strengths and take them from 8→10. Or if it’s your blindspots that are hindering you, work on them. Soon enough you’ll be ready for a new shell.

When you move to the new shell chances are that it might feel like a step back. Things will be unfamiliar and you will take time to get used to your new surroundings. But fetter not, because once you do, you’re ready to grow even higher.

This movement resembles an upwards spiral with each spiral section:

1. Starting with doing
2. Transitioning to learning, followed by
3. A period of adjustment
4. And then back to learning

As you look back on your spiral you’ll notice how constrained your knowledge was early on, and how far you’ve come.

How I Wrote In An Upwards Spiral

So, back to my writing.

I found myself in the shell that I’d been carrying for many years. I knew that I had to start doing to move up the upwards spiral-in this case by writing.

Starting by doing was the right choice. It helped me get a better grasp of my writing ability, what I did well, and what I struggled with. Furthermore, it helped me narrow down topics to work on for when I transitioned to learning mode.

I started writing and publishing my work on the most obvious channel at this stage-LinkedIn. Quickly, I discovered areas that needed work:

• Carving up my content niche because when writing, I lacked purpose and identity.
• Nailing content ideation. Getting better at going from content ideas to great content.
• Being a more efficient editor because I found myself spending hours in “edit mode”.
• Distributing and recycling content

Once the issues were becoming untenable, I switched on learning mode. I dove into a couple of courses on CXL and the content of writers and brands that I loved.

And, voila! I was in a new shell. I’d used “learning mode” to:

• Carve a content niche
• Build a framework to help me ideate, write, and edit with purpose
• A distribution plan (that also involved creating my website!)

The new shell was uncomfortable at first and it took me time to get my bearings-but that feeling passed fairly quickly.

I’m now back to doing-at least until I need a bigger shell 💪

6 Lessons On Learning From Hermit Crabs

Let’s wrap this up with some pointers from the humble hermit crab:

1. Embrace small-shell life. It’s what everyone starts with.
2. You’re going to suck when you start. Start anyway.
3. Do, learn, grow. Remember the learning dichotomy and that growth comes from doing and learning (together).
4. Move up shells when it makes sense. That’s part of the fun of the journey.
5. Be vulnerable. As you move onto the next shell, you’re going to be vulnerable for a few precious moments. Embrace the pain that comes with it and the joy of the journey ahead.
6. Starting with a big shell is over-rated. Shortcuts don’t work well here. As a small crab, you don’t want to lug around a large shell!

Bonus: Look back with a smile. As you move up the shell ladder, don’t forget to look back and see

Thanks for reading so far 🦀

If you have questions or are curious to learn more, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. 👋

You can also follow me or hit subscribe to keep in touch. I write regularly about growth, marketing, and partnerships in tech and fintech.

Originally published at https://www.akuldewan.com on April 26, 2022.

This is one of the most underutilized yet powerful messages for selling #B2B products.

If you’re a young tech startup, selling and retaining customers can be a grind. Odds are:

• Your customers have a long list of feature requests
• Your product is rough around the edges
• Your competition does certain things better

And this is why you bring your customers on a journey with you.

Effectively, you’re telling them:

This is where we are now. This is where we’re going to be. And we would love to have you on this journey”

With this you’ve re-framed the conversation, built excitement, and brought them into your corner of the ring 🙌🏼

So how do you develop this story telling habit in your organization?

Here are some ideas to start:

• Founders — Communicate your vision in a way that’s repeatable to customers
• Marketers — Work with the founders to develop this vision further and pepper it into campaigns
• Customer Success Mgrs — Use this to reframe tough conversations with key customers

#startup #b2bmarketing #storytelling

From being the talk of the town with Affirm and Klarna touting massive valuations and AfterPay being acquired by Square (now, Block) for $29 billion in August 2021, there was a period of time where Buy Now Pay Later businesses were seemingly everywhere.

So what’s the secret sauce?

I would love to say that BNPL attracted the best founders and the best growth teams. But there’s a simpler explanation than that.

As a growth marketer at BNPL hoolah.co I saw that the secret sauce was the product itself: the BNPL product has inherent growth loops that help it:

1. Thrive as a viral idea
2. Create natural growth loops in merchant and consumer acquisition

Let’s dig more into this as well as the other success factors for Buy Now Pay Later.

👉🏼 Also, check out this deep-dive into AfterPay’s growth strategy by my friend David Fallarme which covers a number of other, fascinating growth levers.

Table stakes — BNPL (f**king) works

i.e. It’s 10x easier scaling a great product

Putting growth loops aside I saw the proof in the pudding as hoolah helped merchants knock it out of the park and grow their business by:

1. Driving GMV
2. Increase basket size
3. Driving new consumer demographics to purchase
4. A host of second order benefits for merchants, including connecting better with customers, reducing the need to discount, etc.

Having a great product and product-market fit is table stakes and makes driving the growth loops a whole lot easier.

Great product ➡️ High NPS ➡️ Lower CAC & Churn

The stroke of genius — selling payments to the CMO

A key innovation that BNPL brought was selling a payment method to the CMO.

Where most payments companies were selling to the CFO or the CTO, BNPL tailored their value proposition towards the CMO by speaking about driving visitors, improving conversion and average order value.

With the marketing team’s support they were able to integrate the BNPL proposition into the entire customer journey, including the paid ads, Instagram posts and stories, check out page, abandoned cart emails, and newsletters.

This explains why BNPL was seemingly everywhere you looked with what turns out to be very little financial investment required. This “wall of content” spawned two growth loops which propelled BNPL further.

Growth Loop #1: Merchants beget Merchants

The BNPL sales and customer success cycles was straightforward:

• Sales: Sell to the CMO
• Success: Activate Merchants by integrating BNPL into their acquisition channels
• Repeat.

“Activating Merchants” became really important to spin the first growth loop.

Because most retailers follow their competition closely, when a single retailer launched publicly with a BNPL platform, this would alert all of their close competitors. Curious competitors would find out more and often find themselves enticed to add BNPL to their stores.

Newly Activated Merchants ➡️ Merchant Awareness ➡️ New Merchants ➡️ Newly Activated Merchants… and so on.

Growth Loop #2: Merchants beget Consumers

What we discovered early on at hoolah.co was that the BNPL proposition will eventually makes sense to the consumer for the right brand and the right product.

For example:

1. I see BNPL at the bookstore. I ignore it.
2. I see BNPL, again, at Secretlab. I ignore it.
3. I see BNPL for a pair of Nike trainers I’ve been eyeing for a few weeks. The value proposition clicks ✨ aka the “aha moment”

It’s hard to predict and control when the customer experiences the “aha moment”, but here’s what you can control — getting the payment option in front of more customers and more often.

Again, activating merchants is the critical piece. Activating merchants gets BNPL in front of more consumers and thereby generates more transactions.

Newly Activated Merchants ➡️ Consumer Awareness ➡️ Transactions

By putting the two growth loops together, BNPL businesses needed to focus on activating merchants and this would drive both new consumer transactions and new merchant leads.

This powerful growth loop lead to exponential growth for many BNPL businesses. Furthermore, a single merchant can be “activated” several times, allowing you to spin this growth loop faster and faster.

A better credit product, re-imagined for millennials

BNPL made credit accessible to millennials. This made a lot of people upset — they felt that BNPL succeeded by giving credit to a group of people that traditional institutions (i.e. cards) would not touch.

Not only do I think that’s not true, but that would also be selling BNPL short.

BNPL built a great consumer experience that out-rivaled the credit card experience. Here’s what BNPLs generally did well:

• The “app” experience — BNPLs were deeply integrated into the point of sale allowing you to see exactly what you bought and from which retailer. The apps provided a great experience (it’s funny this even needs to be mentioned) and gave consumers a lot of control over their credit.
• Easy to use — No minimum spend, card agnostic (works with any debit or credit card), and you get approved in seconds. This does wonders for experience (and also thereby, conversion).
• Less shady behaviour — The leading BNPLs want you to pay on time and not accumulate late payment fees, so they incentivise timely payments (for example, Affirm makes no money from late payment penalties). Compare this to credit cards who will slap a penalty fee as soon as they can and where penalty fees account for significant revenue.
• On brand — without the corporate shackles, BNPLs were a whole lot more in tune with their target audience.

A wide Total Addressable Market

Sales rep: Do you sell direct-to-consumer?

Customer: Yes

Sales rep: Well then you should consider Buy Now Pay Later.

It certainly helps that BNPL works for almost any retailer, whether they sell online or offline. This means:

• You can grow bigger as a business
• You can pitch far and wide
• You turn away fewer people

Coming from a B2B SaaS background, it blew my mind how much wider the TAM was and how much it easier this made it to sell 🤯

Headwinds and the future of BNPL

If you look at the trends chart at the start of this post, you can see that BNPL’s star is arguably waning. The sharks are out with many fintech professionals calling out BNPL as a one-hit wonder or as a “payments feature” and not a complete product on its own.

Looking closer, it’s clear that in many ways BNPL has become a victim of its own success.

Because of the strong, inherent growth loops in BNPL there is a strong disincentive to lose a deal to a competitor. Pair this with VC pressure to grow and rising competition, BNPLs faced a tight squeeze on margins really quickly. It wasn’t uncommon to see BNPLs selling below cost or promising outsized marketing budgets to lure merchants away from the competition.

The rising cost of borrowing and increase in regulatory scrutiny will also increase costs in the medium term.

With profits on the decline and costs increasing, this will likely be unsustainable in the long run and the consolidation is underway.

All said and done, BNPL did rock the tech (not just fintech) space, and did many things right. The leaps forward by BNPL in consumer experience and a better integrated value proposition is here to stay. Consumers have experienced something a lot better than what they got with credit cards, and card companies will need to quickly catch up.

Thanks for reading this far, and please share your feedback or questions in the comments 👌

In the lead up to this post there were questions from my network around the efficacy of BNPL, adoption across markets, and so on. It was tough for me to cover that in this post, and I’ve tried to share as much feedback as possible directly (and in some cases via DMs). Safe to say, I feel that BNPL has strong-product market fit across most retail industries and in most countries.

Also, this is a post that I’ve been wanting to write for a long time.

I tested a new way to write and publish my long-form posts in the process. I started by writing two important bits and publishing them to LinkedIn first (Post 1 and Post 2). They were the most compelling bits of my story and a good test-bed to gauge interest in a full piece.

The two posts together have 13k+ views as of the time of publishing which I felt was a strong indicator of interest in a full post. I also feel that the LinkedIn algorithm penalises long-form “Articles” so it also didn’t hurt to publish the short-form posts and some exposure 😉

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I frequently write about tech, fintech, and growth marketing.

Building a great channel program is a dream for any B2B business. Having teams of people out there promoting your brand, sending you leads, or even better yet closing customers? Sign me up ✋🏼

When tasked with building a channel program most founders immediately gravitate towards making a hire — the partner manager. And we’ve all seen that strategy work. But could there be another way to get started?

Having always worked “in-house”, I recently consulted for the first time as a channel expert at ROAS Media and I observed how beneficial such an engagement could be. So I caught up with my friend Mark Cohen, who’s been consulting for a lot longer than I have, and we discussed how working with an external consultant can help startups experiment with channels more efficiently, build a robust infrastructure quicker, and be faster to market.

Here’s our take on why startups looking to build a channel program should consider working with a consultant to get started 🤔

The benefits of working with a consultant

Channel partnership programs take time to build out. Getting the basics right and properly executed by an expert can accelerate your program by months or even years.

A consultant who understands channel programs will be able to provide structure, processes and actionable insights into:

• Building out your partner product
• Selecting the correct Partnership Relationship Management (PRM) system
• Understanding the partner stages and flows within your CRM system
• Acquiring potential partner prospects
• Onboarding and enabling new partners
• Providing ongoing support to the partner and the sales team from first lead → close
• Ongoing relationship management strategy

The list goes on…

Another under-appreciated point is what we dub “the grind”. Even with a basic program structure ready, there need to be many more conversations in order to understand your Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) and develop your relevant Minimum Viable Partner Product. This requires a level of experience that a proven consultant can help deliver upon.

Finally, there’s the opportunity cost of hiring someone full time to run the program — is this where you want to put in your time, effort and energy, when there may be other scalable channels that you want to focus on. It may make sense to treat the channel program as an experiment and working with a consultant to test it and prove it out. Once you’ve proved out the experiment you can bring this in-house and hire your partner manager (which may in-turn be the consultant who built out the program)!

How to set yourself (and your consultant) up for success

When picking a consultant to build your program, it’s important to find someone that is a good fit for your business needs and setting the right expectations for them to be successful.

1. Help them build out the partner product

Your partner consultant should first look to build your partner product (the product that you go out and pitch to partners), and that requires support and time from key team members, including product, marketing, sales, customer success and the founders.

Help them get this support from the team until they get the first version of the partner product ready. Once that’s done, they will probably not need as much time from your team as they go out and start acquiring partners.

2. Break down the engagement into key milestones

Ask your consultant to break down the project into key milestones. Where each milestone is ideally defined by clear end objectives, KPIs that you want to track and milestone start and end dates.

By the end of the project you should have a playbook on your partner program that a full-time partner manager can refine and scale.

3. Be clear on your KPIs

Having clarity on KPIs is helpful for both parties in the engagement. Work together with your consultant on what KPIs (in the form of metrics, outcomes, tasks, etc.) make sense at each stage of the engagement.

In your weekly catch ups with the consultant, you can go back to the KPIs you’ve set and see how the project is tracking and where your consultant may need help. Also, don’t be held hostage by poor KPIs and change them if they no longer make sense.

4. Make them the expert

Which means giving them the responsibility to educate your team about what your partners look like and what are the best ways to engage them. Your consultant will need to set the tone for the project and how best to engage partners, and what resources they’ll need from the team going forward. Empower them to do this and make them the expert within the team.

When to bring this in-house

With your partner product ready, key milestones in place, and the “grind” you should be beginning to see some level of recurring lead and revenue generation.

Make your consultant’s final milestone to give you a signal when it’s time to hire someone full time. In our view, the moment that the process becomes repeatable you should look to bring it in-house to better manage the day-to-day relationships, and expedite growth.

Hope this helps ✊🏼

… and I’m glad that I could write this post together with Mark Cohen. Mark is a former teammate from TradeGecko and a channel expert who has consulted for several SaaS companies including Stamped.io, CartRover, and Katana and currently heads technology partnerships at Katana.

Writing this post together was a fun process, done over Google Docs, and one that we completed in just a week’s time — going from a crazy idea on a call (“hey let’s work on a piece of content together”) to getting the piece published.

I’m a “traveling spouse” now. ✌️

And if anything, I’m proud to be one. I take pride in moving with my spouse as she embarks on an (our) exciting new adventure.

But moving to a new country is daunting, and exceptionally so without your network, friends, family, and work. I experienced it first hand when moving from Singapore to Cambridge in October 2021. It’s unnerving facing the prospect of having to do it all from scratch.

So I’m sharing this guide on what helped me, professionally, as a newly minted traveling spouse moving with no “work”. And for a large part of this, I do have my network and peers to thank. Before I left Singapore I was lucky enough to connect with a whole bunch of my network — 15 chats to be exact, most of them over coffee — and formulate a strategy to find fulfilling work. Full disclosure: I haven’t found full-time work yet, but still think there’s enough merit in this strategy to recommend to other traveling spouses.

1. Make networking your priority

Note that this assumes that you’re in a position where financially you don’t need to find work immediately.

For so many of us our immediate instinct is to find full-time work. So, how about this. Make it your full-time job to network.

You want to do this because building your network doesn’t just make it easier to find meaningful work eventually, it’ll create a butterfly effect that helps you in the long run.

For the first 8 weeks, I set an aggressive goal of reaching out to 40 new people and meeting 5 people every week. This was challenging for the first few weeks, so here are some hacks:

• Join professional networks in your vicinity, including meetup communities, co-working spaces, founder matching apps
• Ask your friends back home to connect you to people they know
• Say hi 👋 to your connections on LinkedIn/Facebook in your new country
• When you manage to connect with someone new, ask them to introduce you to 2 more people. This snowballs really quickly.

2. Start before you go

You want to leverage the network that you’re leaving behind. Before you go, reach out to them and tell them that you’re moving. Meet them and tell them about your game plan, your fears, and your concerns. You’ll be surprised by how many of them will help.

In the few weeks before I left Singapore I told my network that I was leaving and packed my calendar with 15 farewell chats. The effort was worth it — not only was it an opportunity to meet people one last time before I moved, but it also brought with it advice, a number of introductions, and three freelance work offers.

3. Accumulate social proof

As your network is light and you’re “untested” in your new market, you need every shred of evidence that you’re a great hire / founder — that you’re a real person, you’re smart, and you know your stuff.

Here’s what you might want to do:

• Update your portfolio or your LinkedIn profile
• Get your recommendations up to scratch
• Write and publish, publicly, on topics that you’re an expert in
• Start building your professional network (so you’re never more than 2° separated from decision makers)

4. Be shameless

Be nice, but be shameless.

This means inserting yourself into conversations, asking people around you for help, speaking up at events — things that may not come naturally or seem brazen. You’ll need to make that extra effort to be noticed, so (again) be shameless.

5. Get out there (not always literally)

Because the last thing you want is inaction and not putting yourself out there.

Do what you need to do to get yourself in the right mindset — whether that’s holding yourself publicly accountable, getting a hot-desk at a co-working space. Whatever it takes.

6. Did you need a sign to try something new?

(You know where this is going)

A new country also means a fresh start. Go try what you’ve wanted to for a long time. Start something, work in a new industry, try a different role.

7. This is hard

Moving to a new place means on boarding to a new country, climate, culture, house, housing rules, taxes, laws, traffic laws… the list goes on.

Some days you’re going to be overwhelmed. Some days you’ll wish you had your old friends back. Some days you’ll wonder if you’ve gotten it all wrong and should have just taken that first job offer. And know that that’s OK.

Bonus: Seek your community

It took me a while to learn that your network is not your community. I thought my networking efforts would land me new friends and communities. That didn’t happen.

You will need to seek out your community and your network, separately.

Your community is your group of people. People that you will grow close to in your time away from home. And usually what you need in your community won’t align with your network. Build your network, and seek your community.

I hope that this guide can help my fellow Traveling Spouses (TS) gang in some small way ✊

I’m well aware that this guide is ignorant of personal circumstances that fellow TS may face. So, I’d encourage anyone to take this with a pinch of salt and pick and choose the items that make sense for you.

If you know any TS or soon to be TS, please share this with them.

And, finally, if you’re a fellow TS, I’d love to hear what you’ve learnt in your own journeys. You can follow my professional journey and connect with me here — https://www.linkedin.com/in/akuldewan/

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:

1. List down your company’s biggest goals for this calendar year.
2. Write 2 ideas on how your resellers can help drive each goal and the incentive you can provide them.
3. 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.

Having a robust reseller program is a dream for any SaaS business. Who wouldn’t want teams of sales and support reps around the world carrying their brand and helping them to acquire and support new customers? Better yet, they’re not even on your payroll — which does wonders for your cost to acquire and cost to support customers.

But building a reseller program is hard work (we’re building one at TradeGecko right now!). Just because you’ve received some inbound interest from people wanting to carry your product that doesn’t mean your reseller program is going to be a hit. In fact building a great reseller program requires more than just the ‘great’ product you have right now. It requires a lot of thought, careful execution, money, and time… a lot of time. So much so that it may just make more sense for you to ignore resellers and focus 100% of your time on optimising your direct funnel.

Maybe you’re already working on this and you’re seeing some traction when running your reseller program experiment, so you’re thinking of turning on the growth accelerator. At this point in time, you have to start asking yourself the following three questions:

1. What’s your value proposition to resellers?

When building a reseller program, it’s imperative to have a strategy in order to acquire resellers. After all, you have competitors in the market that your resellers could easily work with. So why should they choose to bet their company on you?

For a start, you need to build your value proposition around the problems your resellers face. They need to:

• Market themselves
• Consult and sell to prospective clients
• Implement solutions
• Support their customer base

Which of these jobs can you alleviate for them? A good reseller program would help to relieve pain points at every level of the reseller’s funnel, focusing on marketing and sales as these tend to be the biggest challenge for their reseller base.

Look at the reseller programs of market leaders and your competitors, but most importantly look at your own product and how it can help solve your resellers challenges.

2. Do you have a solid product and support?

If you don’t have a solid answer to this, a reseller program might be the least of your problems. While the definition of ‘solid product and support’ may be subjective, a reseller program does not work if your product has considerable gaps, breaks often, or if you have poor customer support.

You need to understand that a reseller’s relationship with their clients is built upon trust. While this benefits you because their customers are less likely to churn, it also means that there are only so many times you can let your reseller partners down as this affects the trust they’ve built with their client. If they continue to face poor support or product breakdowns, they will consider bringing their next customer elsewhere.

Having a reseller churn is far worse than a single customer churning. Consider offering your resellers a priority support level agreement in your value proposition if you can afford to and making this part of your program.

3. How much buy-in does the program have from management?

When it’s time to pull the trigger and scale your reseller program you will need your entire company’s support.

You’ll need help from marketing to help promote the program, sales to organise the reseller funnel, work with support/success for special reseller support workflows, and product to help you with the infrastructure. That’s a lot of people and meetings — and without your management’s buy in it will be difficult getting people away from the quarterly targets and help you get your reseller project off the ground.

But that’s not all.

Having a budget does wonders for your program. The best reseller relationships are often those you’ve met in person. The ROI for ecosystem events you head down for to recruit resellers can be incredible. Or help your resellers organise events at tech events, trade shows, or roadshows so that they can recruit more leads for themselves and your business.

Once you’re sure that you have these 3 things under your belt, you’re ahead of most of the competition. You should now be spending your time building out the basics of your program and talking to a whole lot of potential resellers.

As you understand their problems better, you’ll figure out if your value proposition actually works. Iterate, acquire more resellers, help your resellers grow and you should start seeing a steady, growing revenue channel… but of course it’s always a bit harder than that.