Improving Reseller Team Performance Using Deal Registration As The Starting Line

By Steve Murphy, Channel Marketing Leader, Vartopia

Deal registration was created to provide deal and pricing protection to resellers. Prior to deal registration, VARs could spend countless hours consulting, planning, strategizing and generating sales proposals only to lose the deal to a competitor who undercut them at the finish line. That scenario birthed the concept of deal registration as a way for resellers to notify a vendor about a net new opportunity and, in exchange, the vendor would provide additional points of margin as a means to “protect” the deal for that reseller.

Originally applied only to “Big Deals,” the practice became far more widespread. As deal registration became ubiquitous, smart vendors quickly realized that the greater benefit of deal registration was pipeline visibility. Now, many vendor channel partner programs feature persistent registration, expecting every new deal to be registered. Deal registration became, and still is, a critical vendor metric in predicting future revenue. But what’s in it for the reseller partner besides an administrative headache or the pain of knowing that money was left on the table?

Too often, partners focus on the end-in-mind — i.e., closing a deal with a customer — before they get the necessary foundation in place. Similar to practicing your curveball before you can throw a strike, the mechanics matter.  Things like vendor certification and tapping into marketing development funds and vendor-provided marketing automation and social selling tools can be incredibly powerful in today’s world. However, they should be viewed as enhancements to an already streamlined sales process designed to optimize profitability — and deal registration can serve as that starting line, but only when planned appropriately.

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