The siren song of reselling products that are in high demand has tempted many software and security resellers to include email security solutions in their offering. It is after a very large market (anywhere from $10B – $15B per year, depending on what you include) and is still growing. And, with so much competition, there are a lot of options for products to resell, not to mention the possibility to negotiate great margins with the vendors who are eager to increase their channel sales.
The most common model for a reseller involves:
- Discount on initial sale
- Discount on renewal sale (typically lower than for an initial sale)
- Quota (with established players)
However, reselling email security products is not as easy as it seems. It involves much more than just getting a price list from the supplier, applying the discount and making an invoice for the customer. Reputable email security companies looking to expand their business through the ‘channel’ (indirect sales) should be very picky about who they sign on to resell their products. This is not just about finding a deal with a customer, then signing up as a reseller with the customer’s preferred vendor and brokering the deal (although unfortunately far too many companies do just that!).
Before signing on someone new, I require that an email security reseller fulfill the following non-negotiable requirements:
- Be a domain expert
- Be a product expert (on our product, of course, by having trained and extensively used it, used it in their own company)
- Prove their passion for unrivaled customer service
- Enter into long-term relationships (no buy and fly!)
- Focus on the same market segments as we do (in our case, SMB and smaller Service Providers)
- Experience deploying mission-critical apps in a WindowsTM back-office
- A near obsessive attention to quality, in your products, services and interactions
Have you had a poor experience with a reseller who simply underwhelmed you with their service or their knowledge of the products they were recommending? Someone from whom you might have bought a product, then were quickly forgotten once your check was cashed? How else can an email security ISV make sure that their resellers are held to a high standard?
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