Channel sales for easier $$

I love direct sales and the thrill of closing.

However, it is a severely unleveraged business model.

You only eat what you kill even when you are calling from warm leads. It's one sales to the next endlessly until you die or get sick of sales.

From working in a company that does channel sales exclusively, it has opened my eyes to the possibilities.

Here's a somewhat silly idea to try out which I'm going to be testing in a few weeks:

You will effectively become a channel manager, not a salesperson or a business owner as such.

Your role would be to get on board affiliate and channel partners to sell the product on YOUR behalf and giving a cut to the owner/provider.

Find someone who needs leads and ideally has some sort of funnel set up.

Go out and look for non-competing but similar business and offer a 25% split of profit or revenue.

They should be in the same market, talking to the same people. Lots of things to take into consideration when it comes to channel sales.

But for example the company I am at now is a SMS gateway. They integrate directly into the back of POS systems for their end users to send promotional SMS to their lists. Think of bars, cafes, restaraunts etc as the end users.

The gateway wins because they are leverage a huge pool of end users as well as channel partners. The channel wins by offering a value-added product and taking a commission on every SMS sent.

The downside to this is that it's about finding the right kind of channel parter that is motivated and other barriers to entry that slow down getting their end users on board.

But once they're making money they will see the value and start scaling up the operation very quickly. This is what leverage means: sharing resources and increasing efficiency.

One idea that struck me is to channel with a B2B services company that has an existing email list and website/blog.

Sign them on a pay per sale affiliate agreement, give them articles, banners etc they can put on their blog and site.

Now you are leveraging their traffic and existing list without paying for it!

Funnel the traffic to sign up page on your supplier's site, put them in a sales funnel.

Then go and replicate this process with 30+ other channel partners all sending you qualified leads!

Literally all they need to do is to get you a qualified email address and you, your channel and your provider will make money. You just manage the relationship and prospect for new channel partners.

That is just looking at the IM style strategies which I think would work very well. Especially leveraging their existing list to a free optin page which is not selling anything directly. Magic.

Just by having a few banner ads on your B2B channel's site would bring in a few leads a day if they are investing in SEO or PPC etc.

Drip feed your channels info and marketing help, give them swipe files

Just a crazy idea.