Many businesses that sell through the channel often rely on a team of account managers and costly call centres. Sometimes this leaves VARs feeling uninformed. They do not execute or offer a real-time tool to keep partners updated with their latest products, service levels and pricing. Businesses should be empowering their channel and providing them with instant access to all of this information and the support they need.

Any tool designed to do this needs to be cost effective and efficient. It must provide the reseller with the power to help themselves and their customers. As a result, it should allow the VAR to be less reliant on the vendor or distributor. A portal is the best tool to do this. It can offer partners access to all of the knowledge and intelligence the in-house team has. It can also include up-to-the-minute pricing and service details.

There are steps a reseller can take to ensure that partners receive a good enough service from a portal:

• Make it consultative and inclusive, find out what the users want to gain from it.
• Make sure it’s progressive with leading-edge information and provides collateral for sales and marketing.
• Ensure it allows end-users to react quickly to opportunities, as well as business and service issues.

Once these core principles are in place, a features checklist will take place. A valuable portal will include the following:

• Lead-generation support.
• Bid-management and pre-sales support.
• Information on products and solutions.
• Sales and marketing support and market intelligence.
• E-enablement applications (pricing and quotes, ordering facilities, service monitoring capabilities, faults and customer services and billing).
• Timely and pertinent business overviews and industry issues.
• Latest technology updates.
• News updates and newsletters.

A partner portal is designed to be an invaluable tool for helping VARs to do their job and deliver real value to a business. It is not designed and implemented to lead to the demise of the account manager or face-to-face contact, which is something technology could never replace.

Lance Spencer is product and marketing director at Tiscali Business Services.